


the sceptre and the isle

by endquestionmark



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: F/F, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-19
Updated: 2015-08-19
Packaged: 2018-04-15 14:11:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 25,518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4609674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endquestionmark/pseuds/endquestionmark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Waverly says: “It’s the governments.”</p><p>Waverly says: “They’re pulling funding.”</p><p>Waverly says: “I thought you could use some company,” and Napoleon doesn’t do anything dramatic — doesn’t keep pouring until wine is slopping over his hand and into the sink, doesn’t drop the glass — doesn’t do anything but twist the bottle to catch the drips, and set it down on the counter, and turn around, and for all that it’s been a decade, and feels like so much more, it doesn’t matter. Illya might stand a little more at ease now, a little less guarded in his weariness and dressed accordingly, double-breasted grey wool that would not have looked out of place on Waverly five years ago, and now hangs on Illya like a passing fancy, but standing there, in Napoleon’s kitchen, it doesn’t matter if they’re in London in 1973 or West Berlin a decade earlier: Illya knocks Napoleon right out, though he doesn’t move a muscle.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the sceptre and the isle

**Author's Note:**

> Briefly: this is set a decade after the events of the movie, and loosely combines show and movie canon; even more briefly, MKULTRA happens, and nobody is happy about it. See end notes for acknowledgments, citations, and explanations.

Napoleon is in the field when he gets the call, though he isn’t away on business but rather for pleasure. London in winter is far more pleasant than Manhattan, though Napoleon feels a twinge of guilt at the thought, but it’s been far too long since he’s paid his respects, reinforcing some favorite high society connections and calling on old friends. He wipes his feet on the mat and hangs his coat in the hall and walks into the kitchen of his Highgate pied-à-terre and there Waverly is, eating his digestives and looking rather the worse for wear. It’s been a month since they last met in person, a rather perfunctory debriefing on the matter of some stolen documents, more a diversion than anything of consequence. Since then Napoleon has been working his way through Belgravia one tray of canapés at a time, making some rather pleasurable new acquaintances and renewing old ones; Waverly looks like he’s spent the intervening time drinking nothing but black coffee and working straight through the night, though that isn’t particularly new. Ten years in the business is far longer than anyone should have to endure, though Napoleon thrives on it, takes pleasure from even a joke of a mission like the one he just returned from, done well.

“Make yourself at home,” Napoleon says mildly, and rummages through the disused fireplace for something drinkable. Red, and he’s drunk too much tea today to care about its vintage — which is a lie; the vintage is excellent, and he simply tries not to stock any wines that he wouldn’t enjoy regardless of how thin he’s worn — as opposed to its existence. “Do you mind?”

“Go ahead,” Waverly says, and morosely bites into another digestive. “You’ll need it.”

“I do love when conversations start like that,” Napoleon says, and turns away to find a corkscrew, a glass, the soothing ritual of opening and pouring.

His glass is half-full when Waverly says: “It’s the governments.”

Waverly says: “They’re pulling funding.”

Waverly says: “I thought you could use some company,” and Napoleon doesn’t do anything dramatic — doesn’t keep pouring until wine is slopping over his hand and into the sink, doesn’t drop the glass — doesn’t do anything but twist the bottle to catch the drips, and set it down on the counter, and turn around, and for all that it’s been a decade, and feels like so much more, it doesn’t matter. Illya might stand a little more at ease now, a little less guarded in his weariness and dressed accordingly, double-breasted grey wool that would not have looked out of place on Waverly five years ago, and now hangs on Illya like a passing fancy, but standing there, in Napoleon’s kitchen, it doesn’t matter if they’re in London in 1973 or West Berlin a decade earlier: Illya knocks Napoleon right out, though he doesn’t move a muscle.

“You’ll be well taken care of,” Waverly says, because of course he’s doing the decent thing, coming to tell them in person, though London is somewhere he doesn’t particularly seem to enjoy being, these days. Whenever Napoleon wanders into Del Floria’s — more and more rarely, these days; once every few months rather than weekly — Waverly looks more and more as if he’ll disappear into black-and-white, the final frame of some old film, fading into history as a footnote at best. Pensions, and protection, and no press, and more mundane considerations like turning in their numbers, and all Napoleon can think of is how he didn’t see this coming, and how he should have, and how he can find a way out. For a very long time now he’s been living a stolen life, and now the rug’s been pulled out from under him, and once again Illya is next to him for it, and Napoleon doesn’t know whether to fight or flee.

He’ll land on his feet, of course. Napoleon always does, and takes great pride in it, and — well, Illya’s life is nothing to do with him these days, but — Napoleon doesn’t like to think about that if possible, like prodding around the edges of an entry wound and ignoring the leaden mass within. Illya will find his feet too, and that’s as much as Napoleon wants to consider in that respect. He’s a good spy, professional and competent and with an unmatched work ethic; Illya can’t improvise the way Napoleon does, but ten years from now, they’ll be on solid footing again, and most likely on opposite sides of the globe, and maybe Napoleon will have found an exit wound by then.

“Gentlemen,” Waverly says, standing and brushing crumbs from his fingers, and Napoleon finally looks away, settles on a neutral expression and meets Waverly’s eyes. “It’s been an honor and a privilege.”

 _Those words don’t mean much anymore_ , Napoleon thinks, and shakes Waverly’s hand, and doesn’t meet Illya’s eyes, and waits until he hears the door close to pour himself another glass of wine, and tip half of it down his throat at one go.

“Drink?” he says to Illya, holding up the bottle for inspection.

“No, thank you,” Illya says, and shifts; he looks only slightly less uncomfortable than Napoleon feels, which is something, at least, that he can still read. Napoleon shrugs and takes another swallow, swirling the dregs around the glass, tapping his finger on the stem before he remembers, and stops.

“What brings you,” Napoleon says, and tilts the glass a little, “here, then? I thought you were away on official business — that matter in Washington — or perhaps South America? One hears things.”

“Waverly called," Illya says. “He thought—” and now it’s his turn to pause, and not meet Napoleon’s eyes “—that you would take the news,” and here a moue, something he can’t quite suppress, “better with a colleague nearby.”

It isn’t subtle word choice. Napoleon has never been one to mince words with people who he thinks could use hard truths rather more than kind lies, but Illya has always been slightly more prone to equivocation. _News_ : a kindness, or at least an unwillingness to acknowledge the magnitude of the blow they’ve both been dealt; _colleague_ : not so much a smoke signal as a bonfire. A pyre, Napoleon would say, but he’d like to think he’s grown out of such petty dramatics, regardless of the truth of the matter.

“Well, consider it taken,” he says, and doesn’t even think of appending a familiarity, and takes a quiet perverse satisfaction in it. “Back to Rio for you, or Buenos Aires, or the National Mall, if you’re feeling—” and he stumbles, again, over his words, because there’s no good option: _masochistic? self-flagellatory? up for state-sponsored torture?_ “—bureaucratic,” Napoleon finishes, and papers over the conversational cracks with a raised eyebrow and the beginnings of a sardonic smile.

“Back home,” Illya says, and doesn’t smile, precisely, but his expression softens, and Napoleon doesn’t know if it’s the word — _home_ — or the wistfulness with which Illya says it, but whichever it is, it hits him like a blow to the solar plexus, leaves him feeling as if he’ll never be able to breathe again.

“Send my regards,” Napoleon says, instead, and can’t be grateful enough for the ease with which the words come together, a thousand old habits and years’ worth of deflection sliding into place. “I hear Red Square is lovely this time of year.”

“Not Moscow,” Illya says, with that same faint tenderness, “home,” and there it is, the same ache under so much old scar tissue. Napoleon raises his glass in a mock toast and drains it.

“Send my regards,” he says, again, and adds, “but this time, with slightly less sarcasm,” and Illya doesn’t smile, but he does look faintly sorry for Napoleon, and it isn’t a bullet wound, Napoleon thinks, but a stab to the gut, and a twist of the knife.

“You also,” Illya says, and gives Napoleon his most rehearsed smile — and Napoleon should know; he’d spent enough hours watching Illya watching him, learning by observation and, later, practice — and Illya’s gone, kitchen as empty as if he’d never been there, just an open packet of digestives and half a bottle of a solidly decent red, and Napoleon feeling as if he’s in freefall for the first time in longer than he can remember, unable to see the ground but bracing for impact nonetheless.

  


* * *

  


There’s always an innocent.

Ten years, twenty years, his whole life: Napoleon has always known that there’s an innocent, somewhere, someone who doesn’t deserve to be hurt, and will be nonetheless. It’s the world that he lives in — bad people get long and happy lives, and good people lose what they love, and the sun comes up every morning — and when he had been a spy, he had seen the women and children and idealists implicated in suffering; when he had been a thief, he had known about the guards who would suffer, and where his clients had made their money; and when he had been a child, living in a basement studio with leaky walls and dreaming in the half-light, he had known more than ever: innocence hadn’t put food on the table or paid their rent. Innocence has never been something in which Napoleon has had the luxury of indulging himself.

An innocent, and the unfamiliar world in which they find themselves, and Napoleon and Illya like mythic guides: it’s a story that Napoleon knows down to his bones, one so true that it seems useless to point out, like gravity; incontrovertible fact, and yet different every time. She had been beautiful, and floundering, and the structure had fallen into place around them like a labyrinth, so many choices leading inexorably to the center, and then nowhere to go but back, retracing their steps, and for all that Napoleon needs stories to live, understands how they work and lives perpetually backstage, rearranging the set to his advantage, this one: this one he hasn’t solved, hasn’t pulled to pieces yet to see how it works, so many pins and cylinders.

He doesn’t think about it, when he can; he can’t change any of it, and can see no way out but forward, moving faster than it can catch up. Napoleon had been young, and arrogant, and Illya had been standoffish and reluctant, and New York had been so beautiful in October, leaves just beginning to fall, and he’d been standing in her kitchen, and Illya in the hallway, and she’d looked up at him and said—

“That’s a hell of a story, Mr. Solo.”

—and he had felt it set its hook, and delighted in playing his part to the best of his ability, a job well done and a thrill in the doing.

  


* * *

  


It’s been something that Napoleon has idly daydreamed about for years, watching witnesses and hostages and the multitude of bystanders who get dragged into their game of international pass-the-parcel going back to their families and their lives and their blissful ignorance: a woman running to her husband on the airstrip, a man settling back into the rhythms of his work, and Napoleon with his nose pressed to the glass like the forgotten child at Christmas. He’s never wanted it, of course. Napoleon has always been a little too ambitious — hungry, Saunders called it, when they first met over an interview table in a Rochester jail — and a little too prone to raising the stakes. Left to his own devices, he’s always thought that he would treat a mundane life as a trap, and do anything up to and including gnawing off his own leg to escape.

Still, he’s considered it, and it’s been a long time since he’s shuddered at the thought of a fixed address and the possibility of settling into middle age with grace and dignity. Napoleon wakes up the next morning, and watches the wan sunlight of a London January play through the curtains, and thinks: now what?

Now he finds an angle. It’s what he always does. Over coffee, he runs through his mental list of contacts; stealing art, no: while Saunders never did figure out his methods, he knows Napoleon’s style, which is half the fun gone already. Dealing art, maybe: Napoleon knows enough to be able to pick out the genuinely valuable pieces, and enough to make something of the greater variety of mediocre ones, but there’s something rather tawdry about giving something so beautiful to someone whose only qualification for owning it is their access to a vast quantity of money.

Waverly had said “well taken care of,” which Napoleon has come to recognize as a very relative term, though it isn’t so much money — he’s always been able to come up with something in that regard — as boredom that worries him. Perhaps he could marry above his station, but the very thought is anathema. It’s the same principle as the art: decorative though he may seem, Napoleon has enjoyed his share of wealthy collectors, and the novelty rather wears off when they start treating him as something to be put in a glass case, rather than passed around and admired and appreciated.

“There’ll be jobs if you want them,” Waverly had said, the previous evening, “in the State Department, that sort of thing, if you want to keep your hand in and so on. Nothing terribly taxing but you might find it a welcome diversion.”

Damned if he’s taking a desk-job handout, though. Napoleon wonders what Illya’s doing, what he meant by home — or rather where — or rather who, his half-awake musings in the morning betraying him. Breakfast, and some old favors called in, now that they’ve matured and come due, and he resolves that the Napoleon who he will be now will be someone who not only wants stability, but enjoys it.

He thinks, again, of Saunders, and the interview table, and considers it, now, as something that happened a lifetime ago to somebody completely different, and doesn’t think about choices that he has made which were never really choices to begin with.

  


* * *

  


It hadn’t been early in their partnership, was the thing; not that it would have changed anything if they had only just met, particularly, or maybe it would have. Napoleon doesn’t think about it, though, again, as anything but inevitable, when he can. There are certain people, and certain lives, and certain tragedies, which he thinks of as unavoidable, simply because the people are who they are, and the lives are what they are, and the world works the way that it does, and if he thinks about them too much, he wants to rewrite the world from scratch. Napoleon can’t do that. Nobody can do that. If he thinks about it he’ll break himself on the same wheel over and over and nothing will change.

It had been maybe three years after the final dissolution of the Vinciguerra corporate empire, the various researchers snapped up by competitors, the financial assets seized in the light of certain papers coming to light, and that had been two years after Victoria Vinciguerra had gone down in a blaze of revenge and irony. “We can’t be too overt about this sort of thing,” Waverly had said, still feeling out the limits of his jurisdiction, whether or not they were to be a visible taskforce or something slightly less sanctioned but more operable as a result, on that balcony in Rome, nothing but courteous acknowledgement of the smoldering Rubicon in the ashtray between them.

Five years, though, of partnership: a lifetime by any reasonable standard, whether measured in trust or risk or disclosure. He and Illya had been in Manhattan, back then, inseparable and even more rarely separated, in the west seventies, a venerable grey lady of a hotel flooded with light and luxury, and the woman they had been there to see the personification of both. She had been old enough to know better than to go with them to Paris in the name of “life or death, saving the world, that sort of thing” — a phrasing that Napoleon had grown rather fond of, its showiness and its reserve at once — and young enough not to care, to have simultaneously acquired a certain touching ennui with regard to the trappings of Manhattan class and a certain romantic idea of what awaited her elsewhere.

Hers was at once like and unlike the hundred lives that they’d come into in the past five years, different in its particulars — Schiele instead of Degas, a certain tendency towards monochrome that was unsurprising given her upbringing — but, in broad strokes, the same. She had never heard of them, or of the work that they did, and professed a reluctance which proved to be mostly show. She was touched by their sincerity but simple in her enthusiasm, and couldn’t hide her smile at the thrill of it all. Agents, and a black car, and a flight leaving in an hour, and no more than what she could fit into a suitcase: she’d been dropped into the stories that she had taken lurid pleasure in, and not as a mainstay — the Soviet straight man or the charismatic con — but as the main character. The matters in which she would be involved would be referred to by agents not according to their filing number but with some punchy pseudonym, perhaps her surname and a title more suited to a trade paperback.

On the flight to Paris, Illya had fallen asleep, or at least closed his eyes and become slightly less intense for a few hours, leaning against the window. Small wonder that he could fall asleep with the sun beaming in the way that it did, or perhaps that was why Napoleon had been loath to look away, the planes of light falling across Illya’s face like a Hopper at its finest, plentiful light in an empty room until Napoleon couldn’t find the light source anymore, and thought that it might be Illya himself.

“Do you do this often?” she had said — number four on their ranking of most-asked questions, a list drawn up on one too many stakeouts with only cold coffee and a closed window to divert their attention — and Napoleon had given her his most professional smile. “More often than you could imagine.”

“I don’t hear about you,” she said, with the conviction of someone used to being the center of her small world, and only just beginning to realize the vastness of what existed beyond that.

“That’s how we like it,” Napoleon said. “No mess and no fuss, just the satisfaction of a job well done.”

“Oh,” she’d said, and considered it for a moment. “How selfless.”

Napoleon hadn’t been expecting that, and remembered, as he had been doing more and more often recently, Saunders in Berlin, reminding Napoleon of his time owed, and choices made. Five years, Saunders had said, and five years later, Napoleon looked at her, ignoring Illya shifting slightly next to him — awake or restless, but either way almost certainly listening — and said “Do you know, I hadn’t thought of it like that. I suppose you’re right.”

Five years gone, or rather four years and change, and two months to go. He hadn’t forgotten, precisely, but he had pushed it to the back of his mind for the sake of living a life that was something other than a countdown.

“Two months to go,” Illya had said, low, an hour before landing, when their guest had been freshening up. Of course he had known, and probably hadn’t put it aside the way Napoleon had; Illya had probably treated it like a fact, a number, and nothing more.

“So I hear,” Napoleon said, and watched Illya, and waited.

Illya had hummed in reply, the way he did when he was withholding a response, and Napoleon had wanted to ask him a hundred questions: what should he do? what would Illya do? would Illya come with him? In five years of living each other’s lives, Napoleon still hadn’t learned enough to know the answers, had buried the way he felt about the possible options under so many equivocations and kind lies that he didn’t see any point in unearthing the truth anymore.

Two months, and maybe he would go to ground for a while, take up a hermitage somewhere he could watch the seasons change until he got bored and burned all his bridges and knew a little more about what he wanted — beyond Illya, yes — but Napoleon liked to think that he’d learned enough by now to know that what he wanted, he couldn’t always have, not if he didn’t want to ruin it.

“Sleep well?” he said, instead, and Illya had shrugged and turned to stare out the window at the cloud banks under them, solid enough, it seemed, to stand on, as long as one didn’t look down. Two months: Napoleon had turned away, folding his hands, and had resolutely not looked down.

  


* * *

  


Napoleon knows a duchess, or rather: Napoleon knows a tailor who knows an assistant who knows a duchess, and at some point in the past Napoleon prevailed upon said tailor and assistant to find him a spare invitation to an engagement party, and said duchess was so taken with him that she didn’t particularly mind that he entered via the kitchen, and later left via the French windows when it became clear that a full half of the people in the room wanted him, or wanted him dead, or at the very least in other states of potential discomfort which Napoleon found disagreeable.

Unfortunately, the duchess is less than accommodating. In ten years she has lost a certain youthfulness which left her prone to being charmed rather than frustrated by unpredictable hours and aliases, and so Napoleon leaves an otherwise unobjectionable afternoon tea still unemployed, if slightly buoyed up by shortbread and the appreciative eye of the duchess’ chambermaid.

Napoleon knows a duchess, but he also knows the duchess’ assistant, who is less given to formality and more given to stout. The duchess’ assistant tells him that nobody is in the market, these days, for intriguingly untraceable art, and furthermore that all appointments for pretty young things require a reasonable pedigree, or at least a more defensible arrest record, regardless of unique talking points like bullet wounds and a propensity for silk and anonymity.

Napoleon leaves that meeting considerably less optimistic, and indulges in whiskey and cigarettes alone in his kitchen. He is getting the sense, more and more, that international peacekeeping and intelligence, for all the moral good it’s undoubtedly done him, has been little more than a time capsule, preserving him as he was a decade ago, and leaving him unprepared to deal with a world that no longer requires him. Such thoughts require more whiskey and less introspection, and Napoleon lights another cigarette and considers his remaining options. He has other contacts, less prone to dispiriting honesty and more prone to offering amusing diversions as an alternative; he can descend to a reasonable standard of living, with as much dignity as possible; he can take Waverly up on his offer of an employment transferral, and go gracefully into the twilight.

Of course he considers selling what he knows, and what he can do. It isn’t a pleasant thought, but rather one he would be ignorant to ignore. Napoleon has a specific set of skills and a unique perspective on global politics. If anything, it’s his greatest asset. He’s sold himself before for less, and for less morally defensible reasons.

They’ve built something, though; he has, and Waverly has, and — mental hesitation — Illya has, and something in Napoleon balks at the thought of tipping the delicate balance they’ve given so much to preserve for something as negligible, though not temporary, as his own boredom. There isn’t much in his life that’s memorable, particularly, and purposefully so. Napoleon recognizes attention as a tactic of last resort, something that’s impossible to divert once acquired, and accordingly tries not to attract it unless absolutely certain. In a century, there’ll be nothing to remember him by but his absence, and the world that kept turning because nobody knew who he was.

He’s getting maudlin, which whiskey tends to do to him, particularly when consumed in the quantities that he has this evening. Napoleon leaves the bottle aside, and finishes his cigarette, and thinks: _what is the point_. Why not give it a try, this everyman business of paperwork and desks and the bureaucracy that watches the watchmen. He may have built a career on fighting the inevitable entropy of the world, but this — for once, he realizes, he isn’t willing to sacrifice anything in order to win, whatever that means — might be inescapable. If he can’t catch up with the world, he may as well fall behind with grace.

Too much whiskey, certainly. Napoleon stubs out his cigarette on the windowsill and slides it closed, locks it and closes the sash. He’ll sleep on it, and find some way out. There is always another option to find, and Napoleon always finds it. Nothing about this situation is an exception; nothing here signifies the end of the world.

He turns out the light, and thinks of nothing at all.

  


* * *

  


It had been a routine mission, a classification deceptive in its assumptions. Every one of their missions had started out routine, given the parameters of maintaining world peace; every one of their missions had equally changed parameters partway through, given the general lack of information that they had going in. It was what kept the job interesting. In this case, there had been someone who they needed to talk to — a man about a dog, say, or a woman about a bomb — and in this case they had needed to talk to someone who they knew of by name alone, about somebody else who they only knew of by name as well, about someone who they knew of by name and background, but primarily absence. A lot of people had managed to slip through the cracks in a world holding its breath, growing too fast to keep track of and too quickly to manage. Unfortunately, quite a few of them had also been people who made the world a slightly more dangerous place by their absence.

They had needed her to lead them to this person, and, more importantly, to vouch for them. The person had been in Paris, so they had been in Paris, in a gorgeous old hotel, and two rooms, for propriety’s sake. Napoleon had taken the sofa and Illya the bed, for the sake of less argument, and they had convened over dinner, and convened further in the hotel bar, and then tabled discussion until the following morning.

It had been the usual conversation: the embroidery of false stories on Illya’s and Napoleon’s parts, and a discussion of which sights it would be advantageous for them to see, supposedly to maintain their cover as an heiress and her guards, and Napoleon had taken her measure the entire time. She was as innocent as it was reasonable to assume of anybody, given minor smudges on her moral ledger and a tendency to snag loose bills from her parents’ sideboard. Napoleon said as much to Illya, wine-drunk and loose-limbed, as he sprawled on the sofa, and made no move to do anything but become increasingly horizontal while nominally sitting up. Illya nodded, still a little exasperated with their guest’s conversational exuberance, and yawned.

“Bed for me,” he said, and paused, looking at Napoleon. “You, my friend, could also use some sleep.”

“Sleep,” Napoleon had replied, gesturing grandly, “is for those who will live forever. Mortals such as you and I need to make the most of the night.”

“Nobody lives forever,” Illya said, and pulled himself to his feet. He was flushed, whether from the wine or the lukewarm vodka he’d taken from the sideboard Napoleon couldn’t tell, and a little less contained than usual, in both his movement and his words. “Some of us want to be able to enjoy breakfast.”

“What would I do,” Napoleon said, “without your persistent sensibility,” and hadn’t missed the way that the moment had caught when he paused. His head was beginning to hurt already. “You and I,” he had said, “and Paris, and the night. Nothing is impossible. We might live forever.”

“We won’t,” Illya said, more indulgently than Napoleon deserved, and he had come crashing to earth, headache setting in properly. Hard truth though it was, Illya was right; in their line of work, nothing lasted, particularly the people.

“I’m sure I’ll agree with you in the morning,” Napoleon admitted, and gave up the fight with gravity, turning onto his side. “Let an old spy dream, will you.”

“Old,” Illya scoffed. “You, Napoleon, will live forever if you live through the morning. Some of us — no.”

And what the hell had that meant? _Some of us_. There had only ever been _them_ , it seemed like, both of them, against unbeatable odds, and beating them nonetheless. Napoleon had turned his face into the cushions. “Shut up, peril,” he’d said, an old nickname as an old reassurance, and Illya had snorted.

“Sleep well,” he said, and closed the bedroom door; Napoleon had dozed off with a pounding head and unquiet thoughts, and slept fitfully, and woke ill-rested, and uneasy for reasons that he couldn’t quite name.

  


* * *

  


He’ll go to New York, Napoleon decides at some point during the night, in a muzzy state somewhere between sleep and wakefulness. New York gave him what he needed to get out once, and he’s loved her all these years and asked for nothing in return but the privilege of continuing to do so. New York is where he needs to go to be a new man, or at least new enough to survive in this unfamiliar terrain: he can start from scratch, and see if he can unlearn years’ worth of habits and looking over his shoulder.

Napoleon only owns one suitcase, which is more than he brings with him most of the time. He has a furnished apartment in New York, tucked away between unremarkable storefronts, and owns nothing which he wouldn’t leave behind if pressed. That’ll have to change, too. He’ll have to attach value to small things: the vase his landlady gave him when he moved in, and the bric-a-brac on the mantle that passes for decoration, and even the oddities of the kitchen tiles. He packs two suits, and the shirts that he would prefer not to live without, and weighs his gun in his hand for a moment before sliding it between waistcoats.

There’s something else: an alarm clock, stolen from a hotel in Rome, broken when he found and dismantled it and found a listening device years beyond anything the CIA had. He hadn’t given Illya back all of them, spindly radio-antennae legs and Lucite bulb, planning to take one to Saunders as a souvenir; in the end, he had kept it, just as he had burned the computer tape. He has no doubt that Illya had, in the beginning, tuned in occasionally. There isn’t much to listen to in his freezer, though, between the peas and the vodka, and like many elements of their partnership, he suspects that it has disappeared into the static in the years since, just another forgotten signal broadcasting on a dead channel.

Napoleon stares at it for a moment, brushing frost off the aluminum backing. He should throw it away. He should leave it here. He should never have kept it to begin with: it was gross sentimentalism couched as caution, even then.

He idly wipes away the condensation with a dishcloth and wraps it in a pocket square, tucking it next to his gun. Maybe he can afford such things, now.

  


* * *

  


Breakfast had been, as Illya had warned, hellish. Napoleon had looked at his coffee, and his _pain au chocolat_ , and wanted to drown himself with one and throw the other out the window, so that an unfortunate passerby might experience a tenth of his misery. Their guest had been a little the worse for wear, but positively the picture of health next to Napoleon, or at least the way Napoleon felt. He flattered himself that he looked relatively put-together, even if two thirds of it was the suit. “The meeting is set for noon,” she’d said, and peered at Napoleon. “More coffee?”

“Yes, please,” Napoleon had said, and Illya had snorted; a flash of the night before came back to Napoleon, against his will, and he wondered if he’d been too loud, too obvious, too unguarded. _You and I, and Paris, and the night_ : he must have sounded like a teenager, dreams too big for his body, irrepressible and embarrassing. He had finished his coffee in silence, and accepted a refill. “What do we have planned for this morning?”

“I,” she said, “will be seeing the sights. You will be accompanying me. Mr. Kuryakin — oh! Mr. Angleton — will be taking steps to secure the meeting.” She said it like someone reading her lines for the first time, delighting in their novelty and the feel of the words in her mouth.

“Will he?” Napoleon said, and glanced at Illya. It was sensible, but a step that they often omitted, preferring a reliance on skill and observation to preparation that they did not always have the time for, and which inculcated a dependence on things going according to plan, which they rarely did. Strange, though, for Illya to tell her and not him; stranger still for her to be the one to tell Napoleon first.

“He says so,” she said, and smiled at Illya — less surprising than it had been at first, when Napoleon had found him unappealing at best and actively antagonistic at middling, with worst not something he particularly liked to think about — with amusing warmth.

“So he shall,” Napoleon said, and had turned his attentions to the croissant, which was about as much as he thought he could manage at the moment.

“Loving your conversation,” Illya said, only a trace of amusement in his voice, but still miles more than Napoleon had heard from him about anyone else in the last five years. The one exception had been the time that a junior agent had gone on a date, and had found out halfway through that their dinner companion was a card-carrying anarchist planning an embassy bombing in a week’s time. Illya had been unable to suppress his laughter for more than five minutes at a time for a full hour after being told, and Napoleon had drunk it in like a man in the desert, not knowing if he’d ever see Illya so brilliant and unguarded again. “Yes, Illya, no, Illya, how high, Illya—”

“We have a law against this,” Napoleon said, and had pointed with his teaspoon. “Cruel and unusual and before ten in the morning.”

Illya had laughed, then — nowhere near as unguarded, but still hard to look away from, and simultaneously hard to look at — and Napoleon had held it close to his heart like a particularly beautiful day, or a moment of complete happiness, and didn’t wonder about plans, and secrets, and unexpected smiles, until he was waiting in the lobby, too late to ask Illya, who was already on his way.

Their guest had come down the stairs, all smiles and suppressed nervous excitement and the purse that she had been finding, and Napoleon had offered her his arm; outside, in the wretchedly bright morning sun, he had wished for more coffee and more time, or at least more laughter, and received none of them, and had not known yet to regret it.

  


* * *

  


Napoleon flies out of London late that evening, and watches the lights of the city out of the window until they slip out of sight down the side of the fuselage. There’s a brief minute of scattered lights on farmland, the dark of the English Channel, and then they’re out over the ocean, swallowed up in the darkness. Where he would usually enjoy this — anonymity in a neutral space, and time during the night to compose himself, and limited consequences — Napoleon wonders what it would be like to find this tedious, rather than a study of human nature. He wonders what it would be like to prefer to sleep through the entire affair.

He closes his eyes, and tries to think of nothing, and fails. Instead, he thinks of Waverly, and the retirement he must be settling into like a square peg, and how tired he’d been; there had been a vague air of relief about him, in Napoleon’s kitchen. Napoleon wonders how long it must have taken for the weight on his shoulders to feel more like a burden than a responsibility. He thinks of Saunders, who he hasn’t heard from in five years, and who must have been promoted to a desk job long ago, and shudders at the possibility of working for him again.

He thinks, sometime around three in the morning, when every thought is suspect and intrusive, of sitting in another plane, and of Saunders giving him license to kill, if necessary, and remembers looking up and meeting Illya’s eyes, and the unspoken understanding that had passed between them. They had both known what orders the other had received, though not yet whether either would follow through, or whether they would live long enough to face the decision. Even then, secrets between them had been a matter of understanding rather than withholding.

At four in the morning, he wonders again where Illya is going, and what he plans to do to fill the sudden empty interminable years stretching out before them; at five in the morning, Napoleon falls into a half-sleep, more a delusion than anything resembling actual rest, and wishes, sardonically and briefly, that Illya had killed him in that hotel room in Rome after all, and to hell with the world.

  


* * *

  


From the Louvre to the restaurant in which they were to meet their nameless source, it had been a ten-minute walk, and Napoleon had spent most of it wondering whether he was overthinking the matter of Illya’s reluctance. Experience had taught him that Illya rarely underthought his actions, and that, torturous as it was, considering every possibility was the only way to entirely avoid being caught by surprise; his desire for a little peace of mind was less overwhelming than his fear of having missed something, and therefore Napoleon had walked, arm-in-arm, and suffered in silence, and seen very little of the sights at all.

“You know,” she had said, interrupting the frantic cycle of Napoleon’s thoughts — curiosity, to fear, to self-repudiation, and ( _what if?_ ) back once again — “you and, ah, Mr. Angleton, you make a very good team.”

“Thank you,” Napoleon said. “We work well together.”

“Work well my foot,” she said. “You practically finish each other’s sentences.”

“If I could finish his sentences,” Napoleon said, “then there would be no joy in hearing them.”

“And there you are,” she said, “with an answer to everything. Can’t I express a little jealousy without you having a neat little quip to head me off?” This last she said rather coquettishly, to Napoleon’s expert eye, and she had pressed up against his side, looking up to catch his eye through her lashes.

“Don’t let me interrupt you,” he’d said, and smiled at her a little less than professionally.

“Oh no,” she said. “Too late. You’ll just have to wait and see if the thought comes back.”

“That would be my pleasure,” Napoleon said, and had gestured at the restaurant. “Shall we?”

“Of course, Mr. Rhodes,” she had said, and smiled at the deception; Napoleon had smiled too, half at her and half at the sight of Illya inside, far too tall for his barstool and blocking the barmaid’s attempts at small talk, if his curt nods were anything to go by, and pushed the door open.

“Yes,” he had heard Illya say, “I am finding the weather very pleasant, and the climate agrees with me.” Not avoiding small talk, then, Napoleon thought, reassessing the situation, but rather meeting banality with banality, if rather stilted, and something else caught in his mind, like the pin of a lock. One, two, and who knew how many more before the entire thing came to pieces in his hands, as long as he waited and wondered.

“Mr. Angleton!” their guest said delightedly, and directed her nervous chatter at Illya, who looked as if millstone upon millstone had been hung about his neck.

“Thank you,” he said to the barmaid, who busied herself elsewhere, and turned an indulgent if rather disinterested ear to talk of the Louvre and architecture and the fascinating stories that Napoleon had told her on the way, and did not deign to tell her that Napoleon had told him all of them already, with significantly less embellishment but significantly more honesty. Truth, or at least the way Napoleon thought of it, was relative anyway. Fabrication could be just as true as disclosure, in the right context, or perhaps even more so. Illya was interested in disclosure, almost uniquely so; nearly everyone else was more interested in fabrication.

At noon, the chef had come out to meet them. “Messieurs, madame,” he said, “if you please, my office—” and he’d led them through the clamor of the kitchen, the controlled explosive chaos of a Parisian lunch rush and a kitchen full of professionals doing their job with a maximum of efficiency and a minimum of courtesy. His office had been small, and he’d drawn down the blinds and settled behind his desk, gesturing at the chairs on the other side of the room; Illya had stood, instead, by the door, and Napoleon had taken his cue and sat beside their guest. “—now, what can I do for you,” the chef had said.

They had told him. The room had become stiflingly silent.

“Monsieur?” she had prompted him.

“No,” he said. “No, you don’t want to know.”

They had.

“I cannot be responsible for this,” the chef said, and beside him, Napoleon could sense her shrinking back in her chair, a little, the magnitude of what they were doing finally making itself known to her through the discomfort of another.

“If you were to say something in confidence,” Napoleon said, “you would hardly be responsible for anything we chose to do with that information.”

“If you say nothing,” Illya had said, and the force with which he said it made Napoleon want to look at him out of the corner of his eye, “then you are doubly responsible.”

It was more than Illya typically said when they were meeting with sources, particularly strangers; it was much more vehement than he typically became at any point with anybody other than Napoleon. A third pin, wobbling on the edge of Napoleon’s pick, and he could see the shape of it, but not quite how to set it yet, and he held his breath, for fear of losing even that.

“I can’t,” the chef said, “you don’t understand—”

“I think,” Illya said, “that you are the one who does not understand,” and he hadn’t moved, beyond shifting his weight a little, but that was enough. Napoleon could sense the menace of him, from his shallow breathing to the way he set his feet a little further apart, and it was like the sensation of being stared at, a pressure on the back of his neck that he couldn’t ignore.

“Easy,” Napoleon warned, but the chef had looked at Illya, standing, and at Napoleon, at ease, and clearly decided that of his options, he would rather take his chances with the truth, and damn these foreigners who thought that they knew about responsibility.

“Ask me again,” the chef said, “upon your own heads,” and Napoleon had felt it again — that almost-click, so close to an answer — and, not knowing what else to do, had asked, and listened, an unease that he couldn’t shake settling at the corner of his vision, and nothing there when he looked but Illya, in the bands of light slanting through the blinds, more unknowable than Napoleon had ever seen him, and dangerous in a way that Napoleon couldn’t ignore.

  


* * *

  


New York is kind to Napoleon, or at least New York is not actively unkind, which is more or less the same thing. He’s seen the city crush people into the ground, cruel in her indifference to those who aren’t used to fighting dirty, but he’s come to learn that a good suit can conceal a multitude of sins, and Napoleon never particularly saw the merit in a fight lost fairly that could have been won through other means. He wakes up in New York just as tired as he was when he left London, and spends a day distracted by reacquainting himself with the streets of Manhattan, walks across the Brooklyn Bridge with a coffee and a cruller and looks down at the shipping warehouses and docks of the Brooklyn waterfront and wonders how much has changed, undetectable to his tired eye.

Brooklyn Heights, in a cloud of his own breath, gloved hands tucked into his pockets in the unrelenting arid cold, and back across the bridge to Wall Street, and from there across the width of Manhattan to the East River, and far too many memories along the way, like ghosts to be exorcised, cathartic in the remembering and agonizing in the forgetting. For something with very little else to anchor himself, Napoleon thinks that he’s attached far too much meaning to places. It isn’t songs, particularly, or a particular roast of coffee, or any of the normal things that spark his recollections, but rather a particular intersection in the rain, or the Promenade at sunset, or the oblique, spectral light of January in New York. Here, he saw Illya narrowing his eyes at a crossword over coffee through the café window, and tucked away a smile for himself alone and kept walking; here, they had terrible cappuccinos from a machine more rococo embellishment than functionality, dashing in to avoid the rain. Here, Napoleon had looked up at Illya in the orange streetlight, after a long day of meetings, and wondered at how well he seemed to know Illya, for someone perpetually unknowable, and here, looking across at New Jersey in the nothing hours of the morning, between midnight and sunrise, Napoleon had said a good night that even then had felt more like a goodbye, and lost something that, even then, had made the world seem a little less worth the saving.

It isn’t so much a day of distraction as of mourning, he supposes, or something like that. It seems rather ritualistic, like washing and dressing a body in dry clothes and laying it out one last time. Napoleon crosses back over to East Houston, and walks uptown until people stop looking speculatively at his face and start directing their speculation at his pockets instead, shifts his walk to something a little more purposeful and a little less provocative and heads back westwards. At the Flatiron, he stops at a pay phone and calls the number that Waverly had given him, in his trim handwriting on the back of a business card; he listens carefully, and writes nothing down, and takes particular note of the building to which he is reporting, quite far downtown.

Afterwards, when the sun has already set to little fanfare, Napoleon goes uptown, to the bar across from his apartment, and projects indiscriminate availability to all the patrons. A proper wake involves drinks in hand for all but the deceased, and Napoleon isn’t quite dead yet, and intends to prove it. He offers a gentleman a light, and finds nothing remarkable about him but a certain decisiveness to his movements, but understands the way that he looks at Napoleon, and jerks his head towards the door.

It’s far too cold for Napoleon to go to his knees in the alley behind the bar, and far too risky, if he plans to do anything like live here. He does it anyway, and doesn’t bother to take off his gloves, and lets the gentleman — a less and less accurate moniker by the moment — pull his hair, and, least gentlemanly of all, use his throat until his eyes are stinging, and his voice, when he says — “So: mine or yours?” — is underlaid with roughness already.

Napoleon’s, of course, because it’s across the street, and Napoleon knocks over the hall table when the man pins him to the wall, biting at Napoleon’s throat and tugging at his belt as if he were more a trophy than a participant. It’s simple, and uncompromising, and good, or at least what Napoleon needs, to be used like this, an instrument of pleasure — his, and his partner’s — rather than something to be cared for, a person in his own right. He leaves his shirt in the hallway, and his trousers somewhere between the sofa and the coffee table, and by the time they reach the window, curtained in stark folds of white, he has no artifice left to him but the lies he can tell with his body.

“Suck,” the man says, pressing fingers to Napoleon’s lips, and he does, sloppy and deliberate, back pressed to the wall; “down,” the man says, and Napoleon goes, first to his knees and then to his hands and knees, and he gasps and drops his head between his elbows at the first press of fingers. Again, there’s nothing gentle about it, but it’s precisely what he wants, and Napoleon expresses this with the arch of his back and the artless way that he pushes back, rocks his hips until he’s dripping on the carpet, vocal in his neediness.

When he shoves in, the man leaves welts on Napoleon’s hips, nails dug in for leverage, and fucks him in an uncompromising rhythm, efficient and unrelenting. Without anything to hold onto, Napoleon digs his fingers into the carpet, and bites at the corner of his own thumb, the angle of his wrist, loses himself in the physicality of it, and hardly notices the way he’s gasping until he’s almost there, and the man digs his fingers into the nape of Napoleon’s neck — and what if he were to wrap his fingers around, press them into Napoleon’s throat — as if to hold him down, and Napoleon comes so hard that, when he comes back to himself, he can taste blood in his mouth.

“We’re not done,” the man says, and doesn’t slow down — still hard, still holding Napoleon down, still fucking him — and doesn’t stop. Napoleon doesn’t want him to; Napoleon wants to ache in the morning, and not just the gratifying soreness of a night well spent, but the pain of being pushed beyond his limits.

“Promises, promises,” Napoleon manages, though the way he can hardly breathe without making small, humiliating sounds of pleasure is not particularly helpful. “Prove it,” he says, and can hardly think through the overwhelming sensation, feels as if he’s drowning and breathes deep.

  


* * *

  


The chef had been forthcoming, once he had overcome his initial reluctance, or perhaps he had simply wanted to forestall the possibility of another such conversation; the way that he had kept glancing up at Illya, the withdrawn, wordless menace of him, implied an inclination towards the latter. Regardless, Napoleon thought, considering the notes that Illya had drawn up after the fact, they had what they needed, or at least enough to fill in the gaps in human memory that arose as a matter of course. Illya had returned to their room for just long enough to scribble the outline of the information they’d received in his excuse for shorthand — at least it wasn’t Cyrillic cursive, Napoleon considered — and then back out again, booking travel north, by train to Antwerp, and then who knew where. Out into the deepening winter and the unknown, he supposed.

“I can book a berth just as well as you,” Napoleon had said, but Illya had shrugged.

“It’s no trouble,” he said, and had left Napoleon to his thoughts, and his files, and his notes on paper more suited to watercolor than ballpoint jottings. There was still something stuck in his mind, between Illya’s sudden repeated absence — almost as if he could not stand to be alone with Napoleon — and his conversation, at the bar, stilted as it was, and his sudden uncompromising rigidity during the meeting: three points to determine a circle, but Napoleon still couldn’t quite grasp it. If he didn’t know better, he would say that Illya couldn’t wait to finish the job, and seek distraction elsewhere. The only reason that he didn’t know better was, admittedly, that he couldn’t find a motive, and Illya rarely acted without cause, though there were enough options here, and Napoleon forced himself to itemize them.

First: Napoleon himself was the cause. He had been too vocal, or too unprofessional, or too overt in his attachment, though given his reluctance to articulate it even to himself, Napoleon found this an unlikely scenario. Illya was however very good at knowing things before other people, even the people implicated, and perhaps this was why he had withdrawn himself, even to this small extent; the degree of panic with which Napoleon responded was equally indication of how unable he was to see the situation clearly, like asking someone neck-deep in the ocean to map its boundaries.

Second: the situation was as it seemed, and Illya was, for whatever reason, weary, either of the job or their partnership or their guest. Weariness passed. A week of rest, and all would be well, and Napoleon could distract himself once more, find outlets in work and pleasure and the hundred diversions he found in a typical week, and nothing would need to change.

Third: Illya knew something that he didn’t, and was not willing to share, and was uneasy. It wouldn’t be the first time, either, that he had been unwilling to disclose the cause of his uneasiness without a good reason. Napoleon trusted him to make that judgement, and to handle its consequences if and when they arose.

There was a fourth option. Napoleon did not like to think about it, and was preempted by a knock on the door, for which he felt a shameful wash of gratitude.

“Mr. Rhodes,” their guest said, and he had hardly opened the door when she slipped in, and perched on the edge of the sofa.

“What can I do for you?” Napoleon said, and stood, shuffling the papers in his hands into order and slotting them back into their folder on the coffee table.

“The thought came back,” she said, and looked up at him, beckoning.

“Did it now,” Napoleon said, and didn’t think about the fourth option, and rounded the coffee table to stand beside her, hands in his pockets. “Was it worthwhile?”

“I don’t know,” she said, “you’ll have to wait and see,” and she’d stood, and smoothed a hand down his tie, and smiled, and for a while, it had been easier for Napoleon to lean into her touch, and the curve of her lips, and not consider the possibility that he had been living his life according to a fundamental untruth, a trust that had never existed to begin with, and had yet been betrayed, and had only just realized it now.

  


* * *

  


In the morning, Napoleon wakes, and stretches, and shouldn’t enjoy a pain beyond pleasant exhaustion, but does regardless. He covers over his bruises with clothes suitable to one’s first day in the office, and only lingers over the welts on his hips, raised now, and a little puffy, for a moment, and leaves early enough to pick up coffee from the deli on the corner, twice-boiled and refreshingly tannic, before hailing a cab and heading downtown.

Napoleon had considered the possibility that he would meet Saunders again, in the office, a combination of sod’s law and a recent inability to escape figures from his past, but he doesn’t. The man who gives him a tour of the section, all the way back to his office, which looks out on an airshaft made more tragic by the introduction of meagre greenery, is much younger than Saunders was, but manages to affect even more condescending irritation.

“We do things quite differently than you’re used to, here,” he says, and leans on the desk that is to be Napoleon’s. “You’ll be handling communications and debriefing, though we’ll start you with experienced agents, so you can get the hang of things.”

“I’m sure I’ll pick it up as I go,” Napoleon says, and wonders: were they ever like this? Surely they were a little less impersonal, when Waverly ran things, or even when Saunders did, though he hardly met Saunders in an office, dressed for business, and after all, Napoleon had hardly been a person at the time — still isn’t, but that’s neither here nor there — rather than backed into a corner, and fighting tooth and nail to find a way out.

“Well, welcome to the office, Mr. Solo,” the man says, and shakes his hand just as disinterestedly as he’s done everything else. “I look forward to working with you.”

 _I don’t think you do_ , Napoleon doesn’t say, and stares briefly out at the grey half-light filtering down between the buildings, six stories’ worth of soot-streaked windows filtering it down to him, and then goes to find the supply closet, to steal as many pens as he can in a gesture of petty rebellion.

The agents he meets with after lunch are not particularly experienced, though Napoleon supposes that such things are relative. What they are is confrontational, and unwilling to abide questioning, and borderline incompetent as a result; Napoleon asks them whether they took measures to avoid collateral damage, and they look at him as if the very concept is foreign to them, and he asks them about equipment loss in the field, and they shrug, and he notes all of it down on forms that have nowhere near enough space to write anything useful, and can’t help asking questions that he doesn’t want to know the answers to, and which the agents can’t adequately address anyway.

“Thank you,” he says, at the end of the debriefing, and the agents simply nod at him on their way out. He gets the sense that the reputation he’s likely to gain around the office is one of being difficult at best, and actively obstructive at worst, if the agents he’s worked with are anything to go by. They’re young men, with a brashness and confidence that Napoleon recognizes from experience, but unlike Napoleon, they are unlikely to either learn better or to live long enough to do so. Napoleon doesn’t know whether he wants to step in or simply watch. He’s never been able to watch someone doing something poorly which he could do better himself — pick a lock, play a part, pull a con — and he doesn’t like the idea of doing so where it might cost lives.

“Just fill in the forms,” his supervisor says, when Napoleon brings it up at the end of the day, twirling a pen between his fingers. A pile of said forms are perched precariously at the corner of his desk, disordered and slightly dusty. “Triplicate and color-coded, and it’s out of your hands. You’ll get used to it.”

Napoleon supposes he will. It isn’t a very comforting thought.

  


* * *

  


Antwerp was unlike anywhere else Napoleon had been. He found every city unique, of course, but Antwerp was wholly itself, at least inasmuch as he had been able to take its measure in the hours between their arrival and their meeting, word sent ahead to vouch for them and set the time and place. Rather than staying in a hotel, they had borrowing an apartment belonging to a landlady of Illya’s acquaintance, and when she had answered the door, she stared up at him. “Come down here,” she had demanded, though she wasn’t much shorter than Napoleon, and Illya leaned down so that she could glare first at fresh imperfections, and then at Napoleon, as if every one had been his fault. Napoleon knew for certain that the nick where Illya had cut himself shaving was down to the motion of the train that morning, and the size of the bathroom, and could not possibly be blamed on him, but had found himself pasting on his most blandly unimpeachable smile anyway.

“My partner,” Illya said, gesturing at Napoleon, “and our guest,” and the landlady had raised an eyebrow at him.

“And which one of them will you be sharing with?” she had inquired, completely merciless.

“I imagine that they will be sharing,” Illya replied, and Napoleon had heard something of himself in the smoothness of Illya’s answer: unimpeachable, and unreadable, and met with a corrosive curiosity on his own part.

“You must tell me all about it,” the landlady said — or, no, had she? Had she looked at Napoleon disapprovingly, or with a knowing eye, or had it been Illya who she looked at with discomforting assessment in her gaze? Had she shown them the apartment or simply handed Illya the key, and had she spoken to their guest at all — and then the story had proceeded, Napoleon supposes, but he isn’t sure how, now, the weight of stories past like lacquer on his bones, each one a new ring to be read when he’s opened up for his secrets, nothing left to give.

She had closed the door after them, though, and Illya had claimed the bedroom with a window, laid his case down and disappeared downstairs for tea and reminiscences and, in all likelihood, the usual harmless background noise of mild sedition that arises in all kitchens.

“We have five minutes,” Napoleon had said, turning to their guest, and she had smiled.

“Such a good team,” she said, “that you know things before the other does, and keep the secrets that he don’t know he has yet.”

“I don’t know what you mean by that,” Napoleon had said, which had been very slight, as lies go.

“Well, surely you’ve seen,” she said. “He’s been a little distant lately, hasn’t he?”

“Some things,” Napoleon said, “are beyond even me,” and set his case on the bed.

She’d shaken her head, and it had taken a moment for him to realize that she most likely meant the case, and not Illya. “Oh no,” she said. “We’ll be needing that—” she nodded at the bed “—though I think it’s three minutes now—” and who was Napoleon to refuse a challenge like that, and a welcome distraction from the thoughts he couldn’t quite put aside, now, and a mission gone more and more astray in none of the ways that mattered.

Afterwards, dressing, she had said: “I don’t think you’re right, you know. I think you just don’t want to think about it.” Napoleon had watched her go, no easy rejoinder to hand, and stared at the junction of the carpet and the wall. It was easy as — easier than — breathing, and all the more cruel for it, to consider the thought that he’d been putting off for more than a day, and more miles than it bore thinking about: it was the possibility that Illya had, for any number of reasons, reconsidered his allegiances, and was now working an angle all his own, one which Napoleon could not identify or predict; in as few words as possible, Illya was no longer someone he could trust. In even fewer words, betrayal.

It was too big a thought to lie still and contemplate. Napoleon had dressed in shirtsleeves and considered himself in the mirror until he was in some semblance of order, never mind decency, and passed their guest in the living room, where she was idly browsing the books provided. He descended to the kitchen in time to catch the tail end of a sentence, over the sound of the radio — “what feels right,” something easy to take out of context at the best of times, and so clichéd that it set his teeth on edge — and knocked on the doorframe.

“Tea enough for one more?” Napoleon asked.

The landlady had looked at Illya. “If Illya—” she pronounced it without the linguistic equivocation that Napoleon employed, cleaner vowels “—will make it,” she said, and Illya gave her a look that spoke of indulgent exasperation, but empty of imposition. “We are discussing quandaries,” she said, and had turned back to Napoleon. “Surely you know of such things.”

“Terrible for the health,” Napoleon said. “I try to avoid them at all costs.”

“I see what you mean,” she said, without looking away from Napoleon, though her words had clearly been directed at Illya.

“What lies has he been telling you about me?” Napoleon said, half mock-offended and half the genuine article. “I’ll have you know that the disparaging ones are all false, but the complimentary ones are understatements.”

“No lies,” she had said, “none at all,” and Napoleon thought of Illya in their Paris hotel, Illya reading through files on the train, and the magnitude of unspoken understandings between them that, suddenly, did not seem quite so dependable, and this time, even the whistle of the kettle and the return of Illya’s attention had not been enough for him to put them from his mind.

  


* * *

  


January passes in a grey blur of learning new rules and new habits, waking up at the same time every morning and seeing the same faces on the street and in the office. There are no last-minute flights to be had, no briefings to read on the way, none of the usual improvisation or excitement that held Napoleon’s attention long enough for him to enjoy doing his job, but simply the same regimented routine every day, unimaginative and insignificant and the sort of thing he thought he’d left behind years ago.

He wakes up, and buys coffee, and goes into the office, and tells himself that tomorrow will be different; tomorrow, he will wake up, and buy coffee, and nothing will have changed, and tomorrow, and again, one day after another, like miles of dust stretching out before him, and nowhere to go but forwards. New York isn’t cruel, but she isn’t giving, and it’s February, and the snow melts; it’s March, and the first whispers of spring come creeping up from the south, and the ice is gone from the river; it’s April, and the city is soaked through and lush, a new story springing up on every corner, and Napoleon can’t find his way into any of them. He drinks a little more than he should, and wonders if this is how Waverly started. He sleeps as late as he can, and stops filling in the parts of the forms which ask for his feedback, and all the while he can feel restlessness building up in his chest like a nuclear reaction, catalytic and incandescent and uncontrollable.

“Take a week,” his supervisor says, at the end of April, “and find somewhere with some sun, Solo. You’ve earned it, and besides, you look like a corpse.”

Napoleon feels like one. He feels as though the man he was supposed to bury back in January, a Napoleon no longer suited to this life and this world, has refused to stay dead, and is trying to fit into a skin that is no longer his; he feels monstrous and rotten from the inside out, and he doesn’t know what to do about it. He goes home, and considers the logistics of dinner and drinks and a stranger’s pleasure to make him stop thinking, and then he seeks out none of them, but dials from memory a number that he hasn’t called in years, and isn’t sure whether he’s hoping for an answer or an empty tone.

“Hello?” Gaby says.

“Gaby,” Napoleon says, and there’s a long silence.

“You know, I wasn’t sure if you were dead or not,” she says, matter-of-fact, the way she always used to when she was angry, and wanted to save it up for a real explosion. “You’re lucky I haven’t changed my number.”

“Or I’m good,” Napoleon counters.

“You’re lucky,” she says, and he hears in the background music, quickly silenced by a closing door, muffled conversation. “There’s no way you’re calling me after this long for conversation.”

“I missed you,” Napoleon says, an oblique answer at best, and she laughs, brief and bitter.

“My number hasn’t changed,” Gaby says, and Napoleon wants to say: _yes, but I have_. Gaby was always better at living in the world than the rest of them, more equipped to do so but more willing as well, and Napoleon had always gotten the sense that she’d seen him and Illya and the rest of the section as disruptive in that regard, a reminder of the work that she tried so hard to separate from her home sitting in her kitchen and bringing her expensive wine that didn’t fit her cover. He had never been resentful, or even particularly jealous, of her before, although: in Rome, perhaps, he had been amused by the way that Illya looked at her in a rather darkly ascetic way. Illya had looked at her like something precious, worth giving his life to protect, and Napoleon had smirked then, and later thought about it in rather different terms.

“I’m looking for Illya,” he says, and braces himself for more laughter, but Gaby only sighs.

“I haven’t spoken to him in years,” she says, “though from what I’ve heard, neither have you.” Gaby had retired early, moved to Rome and settled into a life full of sunlight and laughter and a friend who she never mentioned by name, but Napoleon had an impression of an easy smile, and bobbed hair, and the strappy sandals he’d noticed by her door the last time he’d visited; bright lipstick that wasn’t Gaby’s style, and a fondness for oil pastels. She’d gotten out while the going was good, back when the world was still willing to wait for them and she still had a life to build, and happiness to be had. Napoleon had always assumed that he wouldn’t live long enough to do the same.

“Not until January, when he turned up in my kitchen,” Napoleon says.

“That’s a bit harsh,” Gaby says. “Don’t tell me that was Waverly.”

“Of course it was,” Napoleon says. “I think it was his idea of some sort of final closure. Cauterizing the wound or something.”

“Bet that worked,” Gaby says, and Napoleon, briefly, misses her so terribly that he wants to fly to Rome immediately, sleep on her sofa and talk about the good times and the bad, the years that they’ve missed and the ones that they had shared. He breathes through it, and waits for the feeling to pass, which it does more quickly than he’d like to admit. There are some things that he can’t have back, and shouldn’t want anyway; they aren’t the half-people they were then, living in each other’s pockets and speaking a shared language, a world unto themselves.

“It didn’t,” he says, as matter-of-fact as he can manage. “I have a week to myself, suddenly, and—”

“—have you considered that he doesn’t want to see you?” Gaby says, suddenly.

“I don’t need to consider it,” Napoleon says. “It’s overwhelmingly clear.” It isn’t, though, or at least he can’t quite believe it, even after all this time. He had thought the matter so much scar tissue, shiny and devoid of sensation, but all it had taken was ten minutes in the same room, barely a dozen words exchanged, and he’s gut-shot, bleeding out as if it had been just yesterday.

“You boys were always idiots about each other,” Gaby says, and Napoleon hates the fondness in her voice, but even more he hates the certainty with which she says it. “Come to Rome, and I’ll do my best.”

“I couldn’t impose,” Napoleon says, but what he means is: _I can’t go back_. Rome, for all the time he’s spent there in the decade since, has so many ghosts that it makes Manhattan seem like sanctuary; he can’t walk down the street in Rome without seeing an overlay of the past, so vivid that he can’t tell what’s real and what isn’t. Rome isn’t the same, and neither is he, but somehow he can’t quite take it to heart. He keeps thinking that in Rome, he will find the same potential that he once saw in everything, but sometimes a ruin is a ruin, and there’s nothing left to learn from it but regret.

“Come to Rome,” Gaby says, impatient now, closer to the muffled music, “and you’ll be that much closer to finding an answer,” and Napoleon smiles despite himself at her intolerance for procrastination, which hasn’t changed at all.

“I did miss you,” he says, a little of the old humor to it.

“You’d better have,” Gaby says, and hangs up on him.

Napoleon looks around his apartment, and thinks that there is very little he’s interested in bringing with him, and lays out his case, and for the first time in what seems like years — may well be years, he can no longer tell; perhaps it’s been April for a century, and raining for twice that — thinks that he might actually be interested in what he’s trying to find.

  


* * *

  


They had set the meeting for the following day in the same kitchen, which had been a calculated risk, and Napoleon had asked Illya about it. For all that the landlady seemed able to defend herself, whether through aggressive monotony or actual utensil-based violence, it was his safehouse, and his contact, at stake.

“Kitchens are neutral space,” Illya had answered, and Napoleon got the sense that he was speaking from experience, an all-too-brief childhood spent above and below stairs, listening respectively to the official party line but, also, to the mutterings he must have heard about his parents, and the government, and, towards the end, about himself as well. “Too domestic for formality or diplomacy. Good for direct answers.”

“Good,” Napoleon had said. “Sounds like a plan.” Direct answers were exactly what he wanted, from Illya and the landlady and their charming American friend, and yet none of them seemed willing to give them, though Napoleon was not inclined to ask anyway. “Will you be taking charge of this conversation, as well?”

“Not if you get to the point,” Illya said, and that unfamiliar aloofness was back between them. Napoleon wondered if they had been like this when they had first met, and suppressed a shudder at the thought: that had been five years ago, and it was not a time that he was inclined to revisit without a very good reason.

“Your call,” Napoleon said, and left him to whatever he was doing, sorting cutlery and reorganizing the cabinets, and didn’t think about the listening devices he had found in all his possessions that first time in Rome, and who else might be listening in on them. He returned upstairs, and made overtures of making an early night of it until their guest petulantly pinned him to the bed, and made a convincing argument otherwise.

Of all things, she had waited until he was biting at her hip before she brought up the business of their mission, and how it seemed increasingly fraught; Napoleon, somewhat distracted, though never one to turn down a challenge, had to ask her to repeat herself, though he was somewhat less than coherent in his phrasing.

“Did you talk to him?” she said, again, and confounded her purpose somewhat by curling her fingers into Napoleon’s hair, and tugging lightly.

“Yes,” Napoleon said, and clarified: “I’ve talked to him about the meeting, and about our options, though not—” and she’d yanked at his hair more decisively, and he’d lost the rest of the sentence to a curse, muffled by her thigh.

“You should ask him what he isn’t telling you,” she said, and Napoleon resolved that if she was still asking such inconvenient questions, he was doing a lamentable job of distracting her.

“If asking him would get me the answers, I would never shut up,” Napoleon said.

She had laughed. “Now that’s something else he knows that you don’t,” she said. “You’ve just never tried — _oh_ —” and then, blessedly, the conversation had become somewhat less verbal, and more pleasurable on all counts.

Napoleon hadn’t been able to sleep, though, running through a thousand worst-case scenarios: Illya was after information alone, and once he had it would either return home or disappear into the grey morning; Illya had made a deal to hand over the information and Napoleon, and perhaps their guest; Illya had led them all into a trap, and planned to use Napoleon as leverage. They were all equally unthinkable, but Napoleon found them hard to forget, having given them form, and hindsight appeared to bear him out. Illya’s sudden insistence on managing their schedule, and their travel; the odd conversations, and the stilted conversations — code? contacts? — with strangers, and his sudden businesslike efficiency: the pins had all clicked into place, as far as he could tell, and the lock fallen open, and he wished that it hadn’t. Napoleon hadn’t been sure whether he was too close to tell, and had no standard against which to measure his suspicions, and thought that something must give, whether it was the tension or the weight of his doubts or the sheer mass of secrets between them.

He had woken ill-rested and nervy, and felt as if he had his back to a wall and the odds stacked against him, and decided that patience had run out of merit, as a preventative tactic; their meeting today would determine his course of action. Napoleon knew people in Antwerp, or close enough that it wasn’t worth differentiating; long ago, on the back of a long-gone menu from the Cafe Gustav, Saunders had given him the direct number of Illya’s handler, then a gesture of accountability, and probably long-defunct: he had options, though none of them were particularly pleasant, let alone ideal.

Napoleon had laid out his clothes like a uniform, and considered the grey wash of the sky, rosy now at the edges, and wished that it was already the evening, so that he could stop thinking and wondering, and get to work picking up the pieces.

  


* * *

  


Rome is, as ever, beautiful; in May, the streets are already beginning to bake, but Napoleon sees Gaby waiting with a taxi through the airport doors, and promptly forgets about the weather, and the suitability of his wardrobe, a little too inclined towards New York in winter, and everything else except the ghosts of his past, and the particularly alive one looking at him vaguely disparagingly over her sunglasses. “Don’t think you’re sleeping on my sofa,” she says, as greeting, and Napoleon holds up his hands in supplication.

“Your sofa is no doubt to scale,” he says, “presuming a scale that is a good foot shorter than the average agent—”

“In my experience,” Gaby says, “the average agent is me, and all other agents are giants, and must be cut down to size.”

“You always did know how to handle an outsize ego,” Napoleon says, bending to kiss her cheek.

“Just as well,” she says, but she smiles at him, and lets him open the taxi door for her. “Napoleon, you look dreadful.”

“And you never did know when to stop,” he says. “Really? I’ve been giving clean living a try — early rising, early nights, a diet of nothing but whiskey and olives — do you think it doesn’t agree with me?”

“Nothing about the word clean ever agreed with you,” Gaby says, “and I’m only saying that so that you won’t have to, and you really do look tired. You’ve been putting this off for far too long.”

“Rome hasn’t gone anywhere,” Napoleon says, and she looks at him pityingly, and he wants to pitch himself out the car door and into the ditch so that she’ll have a reason that doesn’t make him feel terribly small.

“It isn’t Rome I’m talking about,” she says.

“I wish you’d at least buy me a drink before you start in on things like the truth,” Napoleon says, and directs his gaze at the packed streets, tourists and locals alike slowing down in the noonday sun.

“I wish you’d at least buy me a drink before turning up on my doorstep looking for ghosts,” Gaby says, and Napoleon thinks: so it isn’t just him, thinking of the past as something better off dead. “Do you know how hard it is to find a former field operative who doesn’t want to be found? No—” she holds up a finger “—you don’t. You’re lucky that I miss him too.”

“I’m lucky that you picked up the phone,” Napoleon says, because it’s difficult for him to remember, sometimes, that he was not the only one who cared for Illya, and who still might; it makes him wonder whether he knew Illya best, or at all, though that’s foolish. Of course he knew Illya, though in the end, it hadn’t been enough, or he hadn’t known him well enough, or he hadn’t tried hard enough.

“You’re lucky that I missed you,” Gaby says, and he barely smiles out the window, because such an admission is not something to be taken lightly, and he doesn’t want to make her feel as if he’s taking it as a victory, or anything other than the simple statement that it is.

“It’s good to see you,” Napoleon says, instead, and trusts that she’ll understand what he isn’t saying.

“You flatterer,” Gaby says drily, and rummages in her bag. “See if you say that after you’ve gone through this.”

“It’s good to see you,” Napoleon says, again, “no matter what horror you’ve just inflicted upon me,” and takes the folder from her. It’s cut down from letter-size, uneven edges trimmed with nail scissors, perhaps, and doesn’t contain anything but photographs: one or two in monochrome and the rest in color, fading around the edges, and coffee-stained, and mostly unremarkable. One is of the front of a café in a town square, a tourist snap with artistic ambitions, and another is of a busy street, the focus clearly on a particularly noteworthy window display. At first glance, none of them are particularly useful.

Napoleon knows better, though, and he keeps looking, waiting for a pattern to emerge, or something that he can use. A café, a street, an open-air market, and he looks through the glossy sheaves of them, and in every one, somewhere — a table in the corner of the café, a vague blur in the reflection of the window display, and in profile in the market, caught in the motion of turning away — he sees Illya, Illya, Illya, and the hint of a smile that he’s never seen so uncomplicated, and so happy, and Gaby, bless her, doesn’t say anything at all.

“I think,” Napoleon says, a good ten minutes later, “that I’d like that drink now.”

“Not so lucky after all,” Gaby says, and he has nothing at all to say to that.

  


* * *

  


Breakfast had been awkward, and coffee doubly so. Napoleon had known his share of stilted conversation in the morning, typically over missing items of clothing rather than professional revelations, but he had played with the sugar bowl and drew lines in coffee on his empty plate until Illya declared that he couldn’t watch this anymore, and was going out.

“I’ll come with you,” their guest had said, and their landlady had once again raised an eyebrow. Napoleon was beginning to wish that she would be a little less reliable and a little more forthcoming with her undoubtedly scathing observations, simply to get it over with, though he suspected that her bite was just as bad as her bark, if not worse.

“Of course,” Illya said. “We will be back by eleven.”

“What if you aren’t?” Napoleon said, much more sharply than he had intended.

“We will be,” Illya said, “or you can ride in guns blazing,” and Napoleon had thought that Illya’s half-smile was irritation, or smugness, or perhaps an attempt at jollity, and thought that everything was happening now, suddenly, the scramble at the cliff’s edge — a lifetime compressed into a few moments — and, soon, the long swoop, the breathlessness of gravity.

Napoleon had spent the morning picking through the kitchen to the best of his ability to do so while feigning complete innocence, which was mediocre at best. He found no listening devices in the drawers and no hidden cameras in the cabinets, though was unable to satisfy himself that they were not there. Five years was an eternity in terms of technological development. For all he knew, he had eaten breakfast off of a hidden microphone.

At ten, he had adjourned to the upstairs apartment, and tried to listen to the radio.

Ten minutes later, Napoleon noticed that he was only catching one word out of every five, and was merely providing himself a background for his newly-discovered neuroses, and tried to read instead; he couldn’t calm himself enough to do anything but skim, and settled for staring out the window, watching purposeful passersby and smaller birds nesting in the eaves, tumbling in flight.

At half past ten, Napoleon gave up, and went downstairs to pace the kitchen once more.

“Do you need to be shut in a closet?” the landlady had inquired. “It wouldn’t be any trouble at all. I might even enjoy it.”

“I’m not sure that it would agree with me,” Napoleon said. “Too little room to pace, and the lighting is terrible.”

“I might enjoy it even more, in that case,” she said, and barricaded herself in her bedroom, no doubt to curse unexpected American guests and their poor stress management techniques.

At a quarter to eleven, Napoleon ran out of worst-case scenarios, and began to run through them again from the beginning; at five to, he thought that he would shut his hand in a drawer just for something to do, and barely restrained himself, settling in with a newspaper and a sense of studied casualness to watch the door out of the corner of his eye.

At eleven, the door did not open.

At five past, Napoleon had realized that for all his fatalism, he had failed to consider what he would actually do if something went wrong, too unwilling to accept it as more real than a waking nightmare brought on by too little sleep and too much thinking — and damn him for that; damn him for his childish naïveté, and his unfounded trust, and how he should have known — and he thought, again: two months.

In two months he would be free to go or stay as he chose; in two months he could have his life back, however he chose to employ it. It was so close that he could almost feel it in his hands, the weight of years all his own, and it was ten past now, and Napoleon would, he realized, do anything to keep that from being taken from him again. He had always been hungry, starving for more time, and more life, and _more_ , and the fact that he didn’t know what he would do with it when he got it was no matter next to the thought that it might suddenly be taken from him again.

Quarter past, and Napoleon had moved as if in a dream, compelled by some force greater than himself — and he supposed that he was — to the phone on the wall, and dialed.

“Your agent,” he said, voice steady, “has been compromised, and has compromised the operation.”

Assent, perhaps, or anger? He couldn’t tell. “He’s yours to deal with,” Napoleon had gone on, and hung up; they didn’t need the address, not when he’d called them on an unsecured line. He was flying, or perhaps falling, but at least it was over, the torturous waiting and wondering—

“Mr. Rhodes,” their guest said, and Napoleon hadn’t started at the sound of her voice, but only just, and he was afraid to turn to look at her, wondered if she would slip away if he did. “We were wondering where you were!”

“Just making a call,” Napoleon said, and considered how calm he felt, how resigned. “I think I’ll take that walk now.” The meeting, of course, was moot; perhaps it had never been set to begin with, or perhaps their source had been equally compromised or given up, or a thousand other possibilities that no longer mattered.

Napoleon put on his coat, and felt as if he was settling somewhat back into a world that he could understand — a lonely one, yes, but no matter — but on the step, when he felt a hand on his back, he stumbled, and half-turned.

“Illya?” Napoleon said, and there he was, hand broad and steady on Napoleon’s back; there were the papers they had set the meeting to acquire, in a folder in his hand; there was nothing in his face but trust, and worry, and Napoleon’s name, half-formed on his lips.

“Napoleon,” Illya had said, voice low, “what’s wrong,” and Napoleon had felt the wind come up around him, the sickening whirl of it, and thought, for the first time, about what might happen if he was wrong, and thought: _there’s no way out of this one_.

  


* * *

  


Gaby barely lets her door close behind them before she drags Napoleon back out and down the street to a cafe that, despite the angle of the sun in the sky, is more than willing to give them a bottle of wine and a reasonably clean glass each with a minimum of harassment regarding both the menu and their presumed status as a couple, beyond a few significant glances. Ten years ago, it would have been awkward; eight years ago, it would have been funny. Five years ago, it would have been business as usual, but it isn’t five years ago, and Gaby might be lending him her spare room, but the less they get used to each other, the better. Napoleon doesn’t intend to stay long enough to leave an updated, less favorable impression.

“That’s your drink,” she says, like someone clearing a debt. “Talk.”

“You know what happened,” Napoleon says. “Don’t make me go through it again.”

“I know what happened,” Gaby says, “but I don’t know why you’re here. Actually — no — I do know why you’re here, but I don’t know if _you_ do.”

Napoleon does, he thinks, but he doesn’t want to admit it; he wants to see if Illya is as lost as he is, and what home he found that meant that he could live in the world again, and who Illya is now that he — it’s an ugly thought, and Napoleon doesn’t enjoy thinking it: who he is that he thinks that he can be a person, a real one, and that it won’t fall to pieces around him, the way it had always done before — is retired, anyway. Illya was always a vector of a person, determined in great part by his direction, and Napoleon can’t imagine him turning that relentless forward momentum inwards.

“Call it a farewell tour,” Napoleon says, and takes a sip of wine. It’s young, and immature, but so was he, the last time that they did this.

“Napoleon,” Gaby says, half a question and half concern, and he thinks that he can’t pull her back into this, not when she has so much to lose now.

“Don’t worry,” he says, “ _do not go gentle_ and all that, I just mean—” what does he mean? “—you know me, I could never refuse an encore. I just mean that I have to know, and then I can stop wondering.”

“You don’t have to know,” Gaby says, but they both know that this, too, is only because she has to say it. He does have to know. Neither of them have ever been able to resist an unanswered question or a loose thread.

“And I couldn’t turn down a chance to see you,” Napoleon says, “anyway, not when I owe you an apology in person.”

“You don’t owe me anything,” Gaby says, “except a toast: to answers,” she says, and tips her glass against his, a quiet chime. Napoleon accepts it as the acknowledgement that it is, and thinks that he does owe her, even if she won’t say it. He owes her for Berlin, and Rome, and the opportunities that came with them, and — while he has no doubt that he and Illya would have crossed paths eventually, and though it seems unfair to implicate her in all that followed — the friendships that shaped him into someone who, now, would consider it a privilege rather than an obligation to owe that debt. It’s an understanding that would be devalued in the saying, and so he doesn’t say it, and trusts her to know anyway.

Napoleon doesn’t trust easily, not with anything that he couldn’t afford to lose; he thinks that, perhaps, might have been the problem all along.

  


* * *

  


On the step, Napoleon had been frozen in place for a moment, and then he had wheeled around and pushed through the door, back into the kitchen, and dialed, and dialed again. The first time, the receiver clicked, and half a second of shouting, and the second time, the phone rang and rang, and every way that Napoleon turned, doors slammed shut, and he was running out of options.

“What’s wrong?” Illya had said, again, and Napoleon didn’t know what to say, couldn’t summarize the vastness of his error without drawing more questions, and ones that he wanted to answer even less. Why hadn’t he asked Illya? Because he had been distracted, had perhaps himself been compromised for years now; because he had been afraid of the answer. Why had he been afraid of the answer? Because it might have been one that he didn’t want to hear. Why hadn’t he wanted to hear it? Because after all this time, and all the times that they had placed each of their lives in the hands of the other, he was too close to tell if Illya was aware of just how well he knew Napoleon, and just how uncommon it was for Napoleon to let someone get that close; after all this time, he couldn’t stand to think that he might mean something different to Illya than Illya meant to him, and intended to keep running forever rather than wait for an answer that he might not be able to live with.

At least there hadn’t been time for him to say any of it; at least he still had that. Napoleon had never been able to tell with any certainty — still can’t — whether it would have made a better story, an eleventh-hour confession and all that would have followed. He simply can’t tell whether anything would have changed, for better or for worse, and whether it would have been worth it. At the time, he thought not; looking back, he wishes that he’d tried anyway.

“I think,” Napoleon had said, instead, “that I’ve made a strategic error,” and — he thinks those were the words, anyway, but Napoleon always did have a tendency to tell a better story after the fact, truer than the truth itself — he had gone upstairs to talk to Waverly on a secure channel. It had been his option of last resort, an admission that would require remonstrations, and certainly desk duty, and most likely a change of assignment, but Napoleon was willing to risk it; he had realized, quite suddenly and simply, that he was willing to risk any amount of personal loss rather than waiting for the consequences. In his shared bedroom, he listened to the whine of feedback, and remembered a Fabergé he had held once, in gloved hands. It had been so beautiful, and so finely worked, and so far beyond his understanding, and he had a client who was willing to pay a great deal of money to keep it in the best of care, but Napoleon had wanted it with an urgency that he could feel next to his heart. He could keep it, and love it, and in ten years it would be dull and the enamel would be chipped and the detailing scratched, and the tiny cabochon rubies lost to the lining of his suitcase, or he could give it to someone who perhaps wanted it less, yes, but it would be safe. It would have a chance, and he could give it no such certainty. It was the noble thing to do, he had decided, and while too mired in worry — not yet guilt — to think that now, Napoleon listened for a voice in the static, and thought of things precious beyond rubies.

When he had come downstairs in search of better reception, not mired in static, the door had been closed, and the kitchen as tidy as he had left it, and not a chair out of place, but from halfway down the stairs, he could tell that it was too tidy, and too quiet: Illya was gone.

There were no marks to suggest his tread on the hall rug, and the bell above the door was still, and Napoleon thought of photographs with faces scratched out, and names neatly excised from the page, and ran out onto the street anyway, though he was beyond hope. Illya had vanished — air, Napoleon thought, like air — and the bell above his head chimed in time with the half-hour in the sudden stillness, and Napoleon had felt the story slide away from his grasp, eggshell-fragile and falling and, suddenly, with no chance at all.

  


* * *

  


Gaby’s spare room is small, and made smaller by the fact that she seems to use it part-time as a workshop, for the parts that she uses to make her pet Vespa quieter and faster and cut through traffic like something other than the overweight guppy of a vehicle that it should be. “She’s gorgeous,” Napoleon says, trailing his fingers down the steering column, and Gaby swats his hand away.

“Wandering hands,” she says. “You’re not stealing this one from me. Don’t even think about it.”

“I wouldn’t stand a chance,” Napoleon says, and follows her up a flight of stairs into the advertised room, which is flooded with light and smells faintly of pocket change, motor oil, and warm metal.

“Bathroom is down the hall,” Gaby says, “and the kitchen is downstairs—” and there’s too much light for it to be Antwerp, and he only has the one room anyway; Napoleon takes in the space until he’s certain, looks out the window onto a rather dusty back garden and forces himself back to the present “—and you can use the hall closet if you need,” Gaby goes on. “There’s one in here but I think I’ve lost the door.”

“It’s more than enough,” Napoleon says, and sets his case down. He’ll get an early night, and the sun will probably wake him in the morning; he can start then, working through the photographs and the captions scribbled on their backs, in early-morning light that will make him feel a little less lazy, a little less prone to luxuriating in what seems, suddenly, like endless evening, and the unexpectedly enjoyable drag of his exhaustion.

“Help yourself,” Gaby says, and leaves him to it, and Napoleon feels as if things might be all right — unlikely though he knows it is, as aware as he is that most likely it’s the weight of old stories with satisfactory endings making themselves known, and bending light accordingly — and doesn’t precisely let himself have hope, but something like it, and too close to distinguish.

He wakes up late, tangled in the sheets, and savors the golden quality of the sunlight and its warmth on his skin, the way that he doesn’t ache the way he did in the evening, and the optics of it: white cotton, the flood of light, the strange ordered clutter of the room, himself, he supposes, sprawled in the center of all of it. Napoleon decides that it would be a disservice to deprive the light of himself, and vice versa, and therefore it is noon before he gets up, washes and dresses with a little less than his customary ceremony, and digs through Gaby’s kitchen until he finds bread and olives and sun-dried tomatoes, and considers the folder that he brought downstairs with him, and does not open it.

He does eventually, of course, once he’s wiped the oil from his fingers and the crumbs from his hands, though it feels odd doing so without any sense of urgency. It shouldn’t be difficult to find the shop window in the picture, though Napoleon thinks that he’ll have a harder time finding the man reflected in it; at most, it’ll take him a day of strategic questions, and there’s no point in rushing. He has a week — a week, and all the time in the world — and all of Rome to enjoy, and relearn.

Napoleon doesn’t ask the questions, for all that they’re simple ones, the next day, or the next; he’s been in Rome for three days when Gaby storms into his room at some ungodly hour of the morning, before the sunlight has matured into flax, and yanks back the curtains, and glares at him until he throws an arm over his eyes and says, “Christ, Gaby, can’t it wait until the house actually _is_ on fire?”

“You’re stalling,” she says, accusatory, in the low angle of the morning sun, and Napoleon narrows his eyes in order to look at her properly. “You’re stalling and if you don’t pull yourself together, you’ll run out of time, and if you’re going to do that, you can get a hotel room and stall there.”

“I’m not—” Napoleon starts, and she raises a finger.

“Ah,” she says, chiding for a moment, and then slides straight back into her particular variety of motivational fury. “If you don’t want to know, give me the photos so I can burn them before you leave them in a bar and make even more trouble for all of us.”

“I’ll _ask_ ,” Napoleon says, “what time is it? This is ungodly.”

“Time you got moving,” Gaby says, never missing a beat or an opportunity to drive her point home, and throws a rag at him from her workbench.

“I’m up!” he says, and levers himself upright as demonstration.

“You’ll be asleep in ten minutes,” Gaby says.

“I’ll be downstairs having coffee and eating you out of house and home,” Napoleon promises, and she snorts.

“Idiot boys,” she says, and closes the door on his outraged exclamation; Napoleon tosses the rag to the side, and rubs his hands down his face, and the old trepidation comes rushing back with barely any hope, this time, to take the edge off.

  


* * *

  


“Napoleon. Napoleon,” someone had said, and there was another hand on his back, and he had been led back into the hallway. “What’s happening?”

“Where,” said their landlady, “is Illya,” and Napoleon had looked at her helplessly, and finally — thank God — a voice had cut through the static, the omnipresent rattle of it, and he’d waved them all quiet.

“I need to talk to Mr. Waverly,” Napoleon had said, and cut through communications protocols until he had him on the line, and told him, in brief, what had happened: his lapse in judgement, the phone call that he had made, the suddenness of Illya’s absence, and Waverly had asked very few questions, for which Napoleon was profoundly grateful. Napoleon could almost see him, scribbling instructions on a notepad and waving them at whoever else happened to be unfortunate enough to be in the room.

“I’m sure we can get this cleared up,” Waverly said, and Napoleon hadn’t quite sighed with relief — he knew the wheels of bureaucracy too well, and how difficult it was to arrest their momentum once they were set in motion — but he had slumped a little in his seat, ignoring the questioning gaze of their guest and hardly daring to look at the landlady.

“Thank you, sir,” Napoleon had said, and had been about to hang up when Waverly interrupted.

“You’ll need to leave,” he said. “Go somewhere quiet, shall we say, and keep your ear to the ground, and don’t lose sight of that file, Solo, after all the trouble it’s caused.”

“I won’t,” Napoleon promised, and waited until the line was dead again. He turned to the landlady. “Amsterdam,” he said. “We’ll go to Amsterdam, and wait there.”

“You can go to hell, for all I care,” she had said, with a vehemence that Napoleon had expected, but which caught him by surprise nonetheless.

“He’ll be all right,” Napoleon said, and believed it more than he cared to admit, in hindsight.

“He will not,” she said, and she had turned from the window to round on him. “Do you have any idea how much he’s done for you — orders disobeyed, information destroyed, missions left unfulfilled — do you know?”

“No more than I’ve done for him,” Napoleon said, and had found himself uncomfortably defensive.

“You,” she spat, “can afford it, _cowboy_ ,” and she said it like a slander, like a curse. “They—” what did her gesture mean? the KGB? it must, mustn’t it “—gave him everything, made him what he is; what do you think they do with a gun that gets ideas of its own, won’t fire when the trigger is pulled? Scrap, that’s what. Scrap and parts.”

“Illya isn’t a _gun_ ,” Napoleon said, had meant it half in the sense that he was so much more, and half that he was so much better, and she had scoffed.

“Not to you,” she said. “Never to you.”

 _What the hell did that mean_ , Napoleon thought, and put it aside for later, standing to lay steadying hands on the shoulders of their guest, who for all of her preconceived ideas of adventure could tell just as well as he could that they were off the page, and significantly into the binding, beyond narrative convention and into the messy business of reality.

“It’ll be all right,” Napoleon had said, and had put all the conviction he had left into the words. “We’ll be on the next train to Amsterdam — you’ll love it in the autumn — and we’ll sort things out, you’ll see. I promise.”

“Save your promises,” the landlady muttered, and Napoleon had thrown up his hands, exasperated.

“You’re not helping overmuch, you know,” he said, “with this reassurance business.”

“If you’re reassuring yourself, you’re even stupider than I thought,” she replied, acerbic, and Napoleon had realized that it was borne, at least a little, of fear — not for Napoleon or herself, or even the pretty American dropped unexpectedly in at the deep end, but for Illya — and he wondered if she knew something that he didn’t, and how, if she was more afraid for Illya than he was, she was still standing. It was taking everything he had to remain upright, shoulders back, and not seek cover by instinct. He didn’t ask her, but she seemed to know anyway, and something in her expression went from terror to resignation; it was terrible to watch.

“I know you care for him,” she said, and Napoleon had found himself suddenly having an even more difficult time of staying upright.

“He’s my partner,” Napoleon said.

“Then he’s counting on you,” she said, and added: “He didn’t fight, you know.”

Illya hadn’t, had he. The hall had been in perfect order, not a smudge on the walls nor a stick of furniture out of place.

“For you,” she went on, “he went quietly,” and had looked at Napoleon as if waiting for a response that she didn’t expect to receive.

“We should pack,” Napoleon said instead, as if to balance the weight of the earth with a featherweight lie, and knew that it was found wanting, and had escaped as best he could up the stairs to a room less full of revelations and more full of regret.

  


* * *

  


There are calls, far too early for Napoleon’s comfort — though he supposes that he can afford a little less subtlety than he’s used to — and there are questions, and there are less answers than he’d hoped, but still more than enough for what he needs, and then there is a return ticket which Gaby books for him in a false name.

Napoleon doesn’t look at the destination on the ticket. There are certain things that he doesn’t trust himself to know, if this is to be the goodbye that he wants, and not a suppurating wound that he can’t help but reopen. A train without a destination, leaving Rome in the golden hours of the late afternoon, and arriving late at night, and Napoleon will wake up somewhere entirely different and unknown, like some quest-led figure from a story: sometimes the mythology that he creates for himself is all that he believes anymore, and all that he can rely on. Napoleon thinks that if he is to trust this as an ending, it must be a good one, worthy of the story that precedes it.

For him, train journeys lost their mystery a long time ago; like airports, they are still places of travel — between boundaries, interfaces between realities — but it is a border that he knows well, and understands to have rules of its own. Watching the sun go down over the countryside, though, Napoleon thinks that, one last time, he is relearning the rules of this space, this interval of moving liminality, and that anything could happen: _deus ex machina_ given form.

The sun sets, and the shadows stretch, and Napoleon doesn’t close his window blind, although the light is low enough to be blinding, now, until the very last rays of sun are gone and the sky has shaded through, mandarin orange to royal purple. When he wakes up, he will be in the epilogue, Napoleon thinks — an indulgent thought even by his standards, but excused perhaps by the lateness of the hour, and the strangeness of his situation — and makes his preparations, and sleeps more soundly than he has in months.

When he wakes, he isn’t sure whether he recognizes his surroundings, or if it’s the strange half-moonlight that makes them familiar, years’ worth of late nights and stakeouts making the hour as much a home as the place. Perhaps he does; dragging his case down from the overhead rack, though, Napoleon finds himself disinclined to examine the thought further, founded as it is more on intuition than anything concrete. He checks into the inn — small, to match the town — with a minimum of ceremony, and barely unpacks; he doesn’t plan to be here for long.

If this were a story, he would leave the curtains open, and watch the slow arc of the stars across the sky until he fell asleep in the ebb of their light; if it were any sort of story in which Napoleon was inclined to indulge unnecessary risk, it would be a story into which he did not fit. He draws the curtains, and tries to make out the stars through them anyway, and falls back into the same deep dreamless sleep.

In the morning, it is as if Napoleon has been transported without his knowing: the room is completely different by daylight, and the walk downstairs is as unfamiliar as if he hadn’t done it in reverse the night before, and the morning sun is no different than it is in Rome save for the context, which changes everything.

Napoleon wants a cappuccino, and he wants to keep living this odd enchanted half-life of unreality for as long as he can. He takes the first in the inn’s small dining room, and intends to hang onto the second for as long as possible, and so, of course, he pushes the doors open and steps out onto the street and there, turning the corner, back to him, is Illya, who Napoleon would recognize in any light and in any context, and everything is, once again, all too real.

  


* * *

  


Amsterdam after Antwerp and Paris with hardly a day’s rest in between, and somehow it was still October. Napoleon had been half-convinced that it was at least December, and that they’d been away for months; he supposed that being aware of every single moment would do that, though, and hadn’t needed to look at the calendar on the hotel desk for more than a moment to recenter his sense of time. Napoleon didn’t speak a word of Dutch, and television had therefore been an exercise in charades rather than headlines; the only news that Napoleon was interested in was unlikely to ever become public anyway, and not for the first time, he had considered how easy it would be for all of them to disappear, misplaced by bureaucracy and lost among the numbers.

He and their — his, now, he supposed — guest did not speak much, beyond the necessary exchanges: food, routines, and at night, the simple comfort of human contact, though not beyond his arm slung over her back, or her leg thrown over his. In the silence, and when he couldn’t sleep, Napoleon had picked his way back through the past few days like someone walking over broken glass. _For you, he went quietly._ He wondered how he could have been so badly wrong, and at what point he had stopped trusting himself. At the point, Napoleon supposed, when he had realized that he feared Illya’s death more than his own, or perhaps, long ago, in the rain-wet undergrowth on an island in the Mediterranean, when Illya, knife in hand, had looked the most human that Napoleon had seen him up to that point, and somehow both more vulnerable and more invincible than ever for it. The specifics escaped him, and he had thought that, after so long, they probably didn’t matter much, besides the fact of it, and the other, less certain ones which he was unwilling to acknowledge. A week, and then he had lost track of time again, except by the tearaway sheets of memo paper on which the calendar was printed, crumpled in the basket by the door.

On the tenth day, Napoleon had walked downstairs for newspapers — two Dutch, one English — and Waverly had brushed past him, shoulder knocking against his. “Excuse me,” Waverly said, and continued onwards towards the stairs; Napoleon had no doubt that his key was now missing from his jacket, and was currently being borne away upstairs along with the answers that he so desperately sought.

He had taken his time, and picked up pastries to go with the papers, and when he had stopped outside the door of their shared room, there had been the subtle shift of weight on the other side — a moment while Waverly checked through the glass peephole — and the door unlocked. Napoleon pushed it open just enough to slip through, and locked it after him.

“Well, good news and bad news,” Waverly said, not bothering to wait for Napoleon to set down his paper bag and armful of newspapers.

“In order of priority,” Napoleon said, and Waverly had given him a remonstrating look.

“Well, we’ve got him,” Waverly said, “or rather our people have him, and he’s on his way home, or should be by—” he had checked his watch “—an hour from now. Fantastic.”

“That wasn’t in order of priority,” Napoleon said.

“Well,” Waverly said, “an hour from now, you know — I’m sure you can count, Mr. Solo — ten days is quite a long time by anybody’s standards, but you know how long it can take to run paperwork, that sort of thing.” He had paused. “Traitors don’t often merit paperwork.”

The word was like a lead weight. Surely Illya wouldn’t have been considered a traitor; Napoleon remembered, though, the landlady’s resignation — _scrap and parts_ — and had felt ill. “Yes,” Waverly said, “you understand.” Napoleon did, and wished that he didn’t. “Still,” Waverly went on, “your job is done, I suppose — I’m sure you’ve read the files, the liability has been eliminated — you’re coming home, too.” He had smiled at their guest.

“Is that it?” she had said, confused, and looked to Napoleon. “A file, and all that — Mr. Angleton — Mr. Kuryakin, I mean, it’s over?”

“It’s quite often like this,” Napoleon said, distracted, “though you wouldn’t think so. The quieter the better, I suppose.”

“Perhaps not for you,” Waverly said, “but I think Mr. Kuryakin could do with a little peace and quiet,” and he had stood, and held out the key. “Your flight leaves in a few hours, though I would leave sooner rather than later before you start writing on the walls.” He indicated the spill of Napoleon’s case, and the disorder of the wastepaper basket. “All’s well that ends well, I suppose.”

“Well,” she had said, when Waverly was gone. “I suppose that’s it.”

“Not the story you expected,” Napoleon said. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m not,” she said, and she had sighed. “I don’t envy you your job, though. For someone of so few attachments, you seem to have a great deal to lose.”

 _Everything_ , Napoleon did not say, and had considered her thoughtfully. “It wouldn’t be worth it if I didn’t,” he said, and carefully didn’t think about whether or not that was the case anymore.

  


* * *

  


Napoleon follows Illya, though he makes no particular attempt to be inconspicuous about it; if Illya is looking for him, he’ll see him. It seems a little more fair that way, though nothing about this — photos in a cut-down folder, a ticket under a false name, no warning and no statement of intent — has been fair, when Napoleon considers it like that. Illya, browsing in the market; Illya, reflected in a window; Illya in a café, and he might not be smiling, but Napoleon can see how comfortable he is, and remembers how he had said _home_ , so fondly, the way he had once said _partner_ , and thinks that perhaps he would have been happier without this particular answer, living in endless pathetic hope.

He wouldn’t have been. It would have eaten at him for years, a slow corrosion of attachment gone sour. Napoleon thinks that he cannot even have that particular delusion as a comfort, and watches the angle of the sun change, and the crowd on the streets shifts: fewer families, more festivities as the light goes bright as goldenrod, and deepens in hue. Illya keeps walking, and Napoleon falls further and further behind, until they climb a flight of stone stairs, and come out in a quieter part of town — the old quarter, clearly — and Napoleon is still at the top of the stairs when Illya turns in the doorway of a charmingly compact house and looks directly at him.

Napoleon doesn’t move. He doesn’t feel guilt, particularly, though that sense of unfairness lingers, or anything other than laden down: out of place, and unhappy to a degree that he hadn’t realized until now, and unwelcome. He waits for Illya to snarl, as he had during their first meeting, or feign pleasantries, as he had during their most recent, or anything — he holds his breath, and waits, and wishes more than anything for a cue — and Illya says nothing, and turns away, and opens the door, and goes inside.

A fight would have been better, Napoleon thinks, or — even the same stilted conversation, small talk for small talk’s sake — anything but indifference. Anything would have been better than a silence into which he could read nothing but his own insignificance, obsolescence in the face of a life that is safer, and kinder, and happier, and which Napoleon doesn’t know how to want, but wishes more than anything that he could.

There are window boxes by the door, and flowers in clay pots on the step; the boxes are full of convolvulus, blue and purple and spring-green tendrils curling up the edges of the window, and the clay pots are overflowing with alyssum, white and delicate and, if Napoleon were any closer, honey-scented. Illya had never been much of one for gardening in New York, though Napoleon supposes that he never had much of an opportunity; he can’t help wondering, though, if perhaps they aren’t Illya’s flowers, signature of someone else in his life.

The flowers are beautiful, and Napoleon doesn’t wait to become even more unwelcome than he is already. He turns, and puts one foot in front of the other until he is back at his inn, and wishes that he could want this, and, since he cannot, wishes that he could have not wondered; he stares alternately at the ceiling and the walls, and does not even have packing with which to distract himself. Napoleon never intended to stay long, and can think of no reason to anymore.

He takes the last train back to Rome that evening, and there is no mystery to it at all — only the rhythm of the rails, and, once the sun goes down, the endless sameness of the night; Napoleon could be underwater, or underground, for all that he can tell, full fathoms five, and not a ripple in sight — and he pulls the blind down, and tries to sleep, and does not manage to at all.

  


* * *

  


The flight from Amsterdam to New York had been, if anything, forgettable compared to the week preceding it and Napoleon’s dread of what was to come; he had ceded the window seat to their guest, and spent the majority of their time in the air alternately staring at the back of the seat in front of him and, when he thought he couldn’t possibly face one more possible scenario — they played in his head like an endless loop of film, but one melting from the friction, and distorting more and more with every repetition — he had slept, though it might have been more accurately described as giving his worries a screen on which to play out, instead of projecting them onto the strangers who passed in the aisle.

Napoleon had been lucky in his dealings with the Soviet variety of espionage: he had been too good to catch, or not worth the time and expenditure, and had only heard of their techniques secondhand, which had been enough; some of them he hadn’t quite understood, and considered that they probably only became clear upon actual administration.

He had thought about Illya when they had first met, and of watching him in the mirror, a man devoted to the mission but not the cause, and of the scar at the corner of his eye; Napoleon had thought about choke chains, and what happened when someone turned so far inwards that his most common expression of emotion manifested itself as sudden violence, and uncontrollable rage, and an aversion to shame so great that death would be preferable.

He had thought about how Illya’s handler had known precisely what to say to take him to pieces, and make Illya so desperate that he would kill his partner rather than risk disappointing, and Napoleon was not at all sure that he deserved any less.

  


* * *

  


In Rome, Napoleon malingers; he keeps Gaby from her workbench, and occupies her garden, and doesn’t think to wonder about the house’s other occupant until Gaby storms downstairs with his suitcase, packed with more care than he deserves, and tells him that he’s making everyone miserable, and checks him into a hotel near the airport with a minimum of ceremony and a maximum of irritation, saying: “You owe me dinner, now, and two years of my life back.”

“I don’t know what you expected,” Napoleon says, “and besides, I haven’t got any to spare.”

“Oh please,” Gaby says, and herds him up the stairs. “You’ll live forever, fueled by stale biscotti — thank you for getting rid of that, by the way — and the sudden absence of any coffee at all in my kitchen. If you’re going to eat it by the spoonful, have you considered sand? You get about as much out of it, and I can’t brew sand.” She pauses. “Napoleon?”

“I’m just tired,” Napoleon says, and she sighs.

“I told you not to thank me,” she says, and sounds at least a little sorry. “Wouldn’t you have been happier in New York, not knowing?”

“I wouldn’t be me,” Napoleon says, and pulls himself to his feet.

“No, you wouldn’t,” Gaby says. “But you would be happier.”

“It wouldn’t be worth it,” Napoleon says, and straightens his jacket. “I do owe you dinner, and thanks, and it’s my last night here — my treat — is that restaurant still here, the one that did the catering for that affair with the ambassador and—”

“—the cat burglar?” Gaby says. “I hope so.”

“That’s where we’ll go, then,” Napoleon says, and offers her his arm.

She takes it, and Napoleon doesn’t manage to forget, exactly, over dinner, but he does smile, and he does laugh, and he doesn’t mind his ghosts so much when they’re shared.

The next morning, he boards his flight to New York, and thinks that perhaps, since he has no alternative now, he’ll find a way to live with his grey job and his grey life and the endless monotonous expanse stretching out before him, like morning fog that will never burn away.

Napoleon dozes off somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, and lands exhausted; it’s Saturday, apparently, though he honestly can’t tell, and isn’t sure if he cares. He sleeps through Sunday — wakes in the evening, and attempts to make himself presentable — and on Monday morning, he goes back to work.

“Got some sun, huh,” his supervisor says. “You look good.”

He must have looked terrible before, Napoleon thinks, if this is an improvement.

“Thank you,” he says. “I must have needed the rest.”

He goes into his office and looks at the pile of forms in his outbox — pink, yellow, blue — and wonders if they’ve been there since he left. His calendar indicates that he has a debriefing in an hour, and another in the afternoon, and Napoleon looks again at the travesty of a garden in the airshaft outside his window, and thinks of alyssum and morning glories, and the finality of a closed door.

  


* * *

  


Napoleon had been alone in New York for a week before he was called before Waverly again, and it had been an unpleasant week, to say the least: he prefers not to think about it, now, or at least the parts which he can remember; not the hours which he had lost to time zones, or the hours which he had lost to sleep as a form of avoidance, or the other hours which he had simply lost.

He had taken a cab to Del Floria’s, and resisted the urge to smoke on the steps on either side of the shop’s entrance. Instead, he had put his chin up and his shoulders back and one foot in front of the other until he was in Waverly’s office, seated at the revolving conference table with his hands folded in his lap, and Waverly had said “Good morning,” and “I hope you’ve adjusted hours,” and “I’ve brought company,” and — if Napoleon ignored the bandages, utilitarian and freshly-changed white — he could almost pretend that it was another morning, and another briefing, and Illya sitting at his right hand, bleary with lingering sleep and not possibilities that Napoleon couldn’t think about.

“You’re a sight for sore eyes,” Illya had said, and Napoleon had wondered for a terrible moment if they had told him what had happened, or if Waverly had called him here to explain to Illya himself, and, if he was quick, whether he could throw himself in front of the cab that he’d taken to get here rather than doing any such thing. He had looked at Illya, though — really properly looked, past the green-yellow of fading bruises, and the darker shadows of fresher ones, and the butterfly bandages holding together a cut at his temple which would almost certainly scar — and realized that of course he had known. Illya had gone quietly, and now he was half-smiling, indulgent and amused despite the tap of his index finger against the desk. Napoleon wondered, briefly, if it meant what it used to — an impending explosion, a tic and a warning — or whether it was a learned reflex now, with a meaning that he would similarly have to divine.

Illya was waiting, Napoleon had realized, and Waverly, too, for him to say something, but nothing was coming to mind — an inadequate apology would be an insult, and an explanation was certainly beyond him, and more than he wanted to burden Illya with indeed ever, but particularly now — and Napoleon sat silent, and watched Illya’s expression go shuttered, half-smile still present but superficial at best.

“Well, I see you have some catching up to do,” said Waverly — damn his sense of humor — and rose. “Mr. Kuryakin, you’re assigned to communications for the next month; they could do with the example, and you could do with the rest. Mr. Solo, I have quite a different job for you, if you could meet me in the screening room,” and like that, he was gone. Napoleon had wondered if Waverly knew, or rather how much he knew, and whether his absence was due to kindness or indifference or some combination of the two.

“Illya,” he had started, but Illya had waved him off.

“Go on,” he said, and got up himself. “There will be time to talk later.”

There hadn’t, though. That night, Napoleon went out and made himself available to an unsuitable lady whose unsuitability was entirely predicated upon her marital status, and her husband’s lack of flexibility when it came to interpreting her wedding vows; the next, he took a girl from the section archives to dinner, and after leaving her at her door walked down Broadway until the sky was going light, and he could no longer ignore his pressing desire for a coffee and a shower. Later, Napoleon had been dropped somewhere in the Midwest, and been drawn into an intrigue that was a welcome distraction but did little to ease his mind, and when he had returned to New York, Illya had been returned to active duty, and there were far too few hours to even begin to say what he needed to, let alone what Illya needed to hear. The two months — flown by — were no longer the deadline that they had once been; Napoleon couldn’t imagine what else he would be doing, if not being told where to go, and what to do, and how it would make the world a safer place as a result. He imagined that Illya didn’t need to be told, anyway.

They had walked, instead, down from Del Floria’s along the river, when Illya was finished with his briefing and Napoleon was finished with the day’s avoidance exercises, and though the intervening blocks were more hostile than they might have been, for the most part they avoided trouble, and found themselves staring out across the river at the uneven distribution of the New Jersey skyline in the darkest hours of the night, between midnight and sunrise. Napoleon was quiet, by his normal standards or otherwise, and Illya made little effort to fill the silence, though he had joked about Berlin, and made some indecipherable inside joke with himself about landing on his feet, always half a second behind.

Looking out at the lights, Napoleon thought that he just wanted this to be over, this awkward parrying; he wanted it years in the past, just another story to be told, rather than something which loomed so large that it was unavoidable. “You always were good at that,” he had said, instead, and avoided Illya’s eyes, the reflection of the water on his skin, luminous and breathtaking, and fell silent again.

“I should go,” Illya had said. “I have an early morning tomorrow.”

 _Come home with me_ , Napoleon had wanted to say, or at least _don’t go_ ; he wanted to catch Illya by the wrist, or do something even more inadvisable like — running his thumb over Illya’s fading bruises, almost invisible in the half-light, or pulling him down by the front of his jacket — kissing him, desperate to communicate all the things that he couldn’t say, or perhaps simply to kiss him. This late, Napoleon found himself unable to lie convincingly even to himself.

“Send me a postcard,” he had said, instead.

“It’ll be in your box for months,” Illya said, and had shaken his head. “Good night, Napoleon.”

“Good night,” Napoleon had said, and knew even then, a half-realized fear, that the sun would come up in the morning on a different world, and one less worth living in. He watched Illya go, moving a little stiffly, perhaps, but if he tried, he could still catch up. He could still change things.

Napoleon had looked away, back at the lights reflected in the river, and thought of an explosion on the dark waters of Rome, and the realization — he couldn’t let Illya drown, he had thought, couldn’t let him go without a fair chance — that this, perhaps, was a fight that he simply couldn’t win.

He hadn’t tried, though. He hadn’t given himself a chance, and when he looked up, Illya was gone, and there was nothing to do but walk home and wake up the next morning and go on in this new, emptier world, as best he could.

  


* * *

  


It’s late — the nothing hours, Napoleon used to call them, between midnight and morning, when the restaurant deliveries make their rounds, and the newspaper trucks deliver bales of bad tidings to newsstands and offices — and Napoleon doesn’t remember how long he’s been in this bar, but that’s probably for the best. There’s a man watching him, as there tends to be, who has been quietly buying his drinks for the last hour. Napoleon may reward his tenacity and take him home, or he may scorn him just for something to do.

He crumples a napkin, and the bartender says, more kindly than he needs to: “Last call, sir, I’m closing up in an hour and you’ve probably had enough anyway.”

Napoleon has had far more than enough, and yet nowhere near. He thinks that he’ll be lucky if he tells the driver the right address, and doesn’t end up at Del Floria’s, where he always wakes the night watch and monopolizes the men’s room and somehow passes for presentable. When he looks up from the sad screw-up of the napkin, the man who was watching him is next to him, and offering him a hand. Napoleon takes it, and doesn’t catch his name, and introduces himself anyway.

“Yes, I know who you are,” the man says.

“Then you have extraordinarily bad taste,” Napoleon says, “or—” he stumbles over his words for a moment “—masochistic tendencies.” There are too many consonants involved for him to finish the sentence with any degree of grace, but he tries anyway.

“What I have,” the man says, “is no concern of yours, beyond an opportunity.”

 _Oh_ , Napoleon thinks, and: _Well, it wouldn’t be the first time._

“To serve your country,” the man goes on, apparently realizing the degree of clarification that Napoleon requires tonight. “Top-secret, you understand, particularly given recent revelations, but—” he leans in, and Napoleon sways towards him “—you haven’t really got much else to give, have you?”

Napoleon is too drunk for it to land the way it should, like a shoulder to the chest, but he knows how it would feel if he were sober, and he knows that either way, the man is right.

“Ask me in the morning,” Napoleon says, instead, out of force of long habit, and the man laughs.

“You’ll still say yes,” he says, and smooths out the napkin. “Here. Ask for Dr. Gottlieb,” he says, and writes a number on the napkin; his pen snags, and the paper tears a little, but it’s still legible. Napoleon wonders if he should lose it on the way home, so that he isn’t tempted. “And for God’s sake clean yourself up,” the man says, and tucks the napkin into Napoleon’s jacket, behind the silk of his pocket square. “I believe that we can do great work together.”

“Last call,” the bartender says again, and when Napoleon looks around, he’s the only one left in the bar. “There’s a cab outside, sir, if you want it.”

The bartender maneuvers Napoleon into the cab, and shuts the door. “Home,” Napoleon says, “take me home,” and gives the address as if it belongs to someone else, isn’t sure whose life he’s stumbled into, but is certain that it isn’t his — even when his key opens the lock, even when he leaves his jacket on the chair, next to yesterday’s — even when he stumbles to bed, and lands tangled in the sheets, and it isn’t until the morning, when his alarm wakes him after the early May sunrise, that he realizes that it is. It’s all his, and he doesn’t know what to do with any of it.

He pulls the napkin from his jacket pocket, and stares at it, and thinks _you haven’t really got much else to give, have you?_ like a knife between his ribs, sharp and inexorable, and dials.

“Dr. Gottlieb, please,” Napoleon says, and again felt that same dreamlike quality to his voice, the phone in his hand, the stillness of the room.

“Mr. Solo,” says somebody on the other end, “so glad to hear from you,” and Napoleon thinks that this, at least, has a certain elegant symmetry to it.

  


* * *

  


After that night, there hadn’t been much to the story, or at least much that wasn’t tragic in the most classical sense, which was to say: a foregone conclusion, because of who they were and what they had done and the world in which they had lived; they had been like ships at rest, except that instead of drifting closer they had drifted apart, pushed by words unsaid and trust withheld and, eventually, rescinded. No story to it, none at all —

 _Mr. Solo, do try to be more specific. After all, for the purposes of this scenario, we are looking for details rather more than general strokes_.

— except for the way that Napoleon had taken less and less joy in work that was still necessary, as much as he ever could. There were still stories to be heard, and lives to be borrowed for a week, and the world to see from a hundred angles —

_Mark this one down as a possibility for future refinement, then; he’s being a bit grandiose for our purposes._

— and the days had stretched like years, and he had felt his heart slowing, and his bones calcifying — his — his bones —

_Stand by for emergency revival, subject is going into shock —_

— and the years like centuries, and so much that he had lost along the way, and he just wanted to sleep, and wake up away from all of it —

 _— stand by_ —

— and if he dreamed: flash of an old story; _perchance_ , that wouldn’t be so terrible, not this time.

  


* * *

  


It’s vital work, they tell him, if they want to keep up with Soviet science; it’s for the security of the nation, they tell him, against agents who don’t know that they’ve been turned; it’s for science, they tell him, and that’s the greatest lie of all. Napoleon doesn’t have the heart to tell them that Soviet science is leaps and bounds ahead of anything they’re doing, but, more importantly, knows everything that they know anyway. It’s a job, and it’s one where he doesn’t have to think, or do anything but try to keep secrets, and fail anyway.

In a way, it’s perfect for him.

They let him pack a bag, which he never sees again, and drive him upstate; they show him to his room, and tell him to get a good night’s sleep, and the next morning, he signs papers that he doesn’t bother to read, and they lead him to a lab, and strap him to a table.

The needle in his arm is no surprise, and neither are the things that they ask him when he first breaks the surface of complete narcosis: _what is your name, why are you here, what do you do_. 

 _Nothing that we don’t already know_ , they reassure him, _you can just skip over the names, and we’ll fill in the blanks_ : their guest, their landlady, his supervisor, names that he couldn’t forget if he tried, but wouldn’t give them anyway; they were all free the moment that Waverly had that folder in his hands, and Napoleon won’t drag them back in, even if only by name. He talks for what feels like years, and one of the men in lab coats whispers, and someone laughs; he feels as if he’s being held under the surface, and allowed up periodically to breathe, and can’t say that he doesn’t find a certain irony in it.

 _Are you sure that it happened exactly as you say_ , they ask. _Couldn’t — what if —_

He isn’t sure, not at all, when they say it like that. Perhaps Napoleon didn’t try to call back, and had simply waited for further instruction; perhaps he had never said goodbye; perhaps Illya had gone back to work without more than a dozen words passing between the two of them, and the lights on the river had simply been another story to make life worth living.

He isn’t sure what he tells them, when he thinks back on it later; there is pressure on his wrist, and the needle is withdrawn, and Napoleon comes back to himself in bits and pieces, washing up on the shore an inch at a time. He notices that the scientists have backed away, a little.

“Usually they get kind of aggressive,” one of them says, “when they realize how much they’ve said.”

Napoleon doesn’t know how much he’s said, but he knows that it’s too much; he knows, too, that it has no meaning to anyone except him, and that what feels like very little weight to them is the weight of the world to him.

“Still,” another says, “there are some common elements — see, there’s this thread, the guilt inherent to the story no matter how he tells it, and a sense of penance — is he Catholic? Nothing in his file indicated that, but we can see if that’s a factor.”

They talk about him as if he isn’t in the room. Napoleon wakes up, and feels as if he’s been flayed open with only a darkening bruise under the skin of his wrist to show for it.

  


* * *

  


Once, they inject him twice, and Napoleon’s mouth goes as dry as if he had spent the last week in the desert; his head begins to hurt, and he has a difficult time telling the story — 

_Be more specific —_

What more is there to say? He was too hollow to admit what he wanted, and he lost it; now he is too hollow to want, anymore, and has lost everything anyway.

 _We are looking for details_. 

Of what, Napoleon thinks, resigned. Of the sheer mass of Illya, and how he knew how to use it like the finest of instruments, or of the way he looked behind the scope of a sniper rifle, disappearing into the gun, or of the way he came alive, really, in close quarters, unarmed or otherwise, unable to suppress his instincts, and all the more beautiful for it; do they want to know what Illya looked like asleep, in the back of a car that Napoleon had driven out of Germany with all the lights off, holding his breath and praying that Illya wouldn’t bleed out before they reached safety, or the way he’d look at Napoleon when he’d come up with a ridiculous plan that Illya would follow anyway, and improve in the process; do they want to know what he looks like from a foot away, an inch, too close to focus but close enough to kiss? Napoleon still wants to know, but at least he is resigned to the not knowing, and the way that, eventually, the wanting will fade as well, to a whisper at the edge of his perception which he can ignore if he tries.

 _Subject is going into shock_ —

Napoleon knows shock. Shock is his hands going cold, and then numb, and his vision swimming, and the knock of his heartbeat against his ribs; he is beyond shock, now, but somehow he still hurts. Shock, he thinks, blearily, should make things hurt less.

_Stand by —_

_Please don’t_ , he thinks, and then, for a while at least, thankfully, nothing more.

  


* * *

  


The scientists are hosting a dinner, which is laughable, because none of them are particularly good at either dinner or hosting. Napoleon is not inclined to help them, but he is inclined, afterwards, to have a drink with them in the library — Cointreau for him, and cigars for those more inclined to ostentation — and he says hello to Gottlieb, who he hasn’t seen in weeks, and who inquires after his health.

“All things considered,” Napoleon says, “I’m glad to be of service,” which is not an answer, but he thinks that Gottlieb had not particularly wanted one anyway.

“Very good,” Gottlieb says. “Have you noticed anything wrong?” Napoleon marks his stilted phrasing, and then considers the question. Yes, he has; something is wrong, though he can’t quite say what.

“What’s happening,” he says, instead, and watches the other men in the room; one is gesturing so wildly with his glass that liquid arcs out and soaks into the carpet, and another is staring at the burning end of his cigar like someone who’s never seen fire before. When Napoleon turns back, Gottlieb is gone, and the room — the room is like the wings of a theater, he thinks, nonsensically — is full of people playing parts, like actors backstage, putting on voices for the fun of it and running amok. “This must be a joke,” Napoleon says, and looks at his drink — how did he miss it, how did he not guess — and sets it aside, and goes in search of water.

He doesn’t find water, but he does find a philosophical conversation that gives every indication of continuing into the small hours of the morning, and becoming increasingly less comprehensible in the process. Napoleon finds himself staring at the few smokers left in the room, and wonders if embers always left such glowing trails, like traffic photographed at a slow shutter speed, and then it all bursts open — the feelings he thought he’d excised, and the guilt too old to hurt, and the doubts he was so sure he’d left behind — and Napoleon, for a while, forgets that anything else exists, and says again, aloud, “This must be a joke.”

He feels terribly small, and terribly insignificant, and when the sun comes up, he aches from head to toe, inside and out.

  


* * *

  


_Something is wrong, and we need to take you to New York_ , they say.

Napoleon is strapped to the table again, and says so; he can hardly object, he says.

 _It’s for your own good,_ they say. _We knew you’d come around_.

He’s used to the sensation of being held underwater, now, and almost welcomes it.

Of course, he says, and lets himself go under again.

  


* * *

  


In New York, they stay near Penn Station. It’s busy, and Napoleon likes it; he feels as if he could disappear into the crowds, if he wanted, him and his suitcase, still packed from the drive upstate, and unopened since, though from ten stories up he can’t see people so much as currents, the ebb and flow of the city itself.

“We’ll just be here for a night,” says one of his companions, a particular friend of Gottlieb’s and a CIA man. “Tomorrow, we’ll get you taken care of.”

Napoleon gives them his blandest smile and nods.

At midnight, his companions retire; Napoleon watches the city go dark, though she shines nonetheless, and thinks of lights on the river; some time after that, he thinks of flames on the Mediterranean, and of Illya’s dead weight in his arms, and breaking through the surface with him, and of being unafraid, then, to dive in.

He looks out the window, sleeves pushed up and tie still knotted, and thinks of the river, and the light reflected on the surface, and the way it had played across Illya’s face, and the way that he can’t remember whether he looked, or merely wanted to so badly that he’s pictured it a thousand times since.

If he tries, he can imagine that there is no glass, and dark water waiting for him —

— and there’s a click at the door, the sound of picks wielded inexpertly.

 _He never did get the hang of it,_ Napoleon thinks nonsensically, and then: _what?_ Illya is in Rome, and Napoleon is dead, for all intents and purposes, including his own.

The door swings open, though, and though the room is dark, Napoleon watches Illya put a finger to his lips, and can’t suppress his smile, and feels his heart breaking.

“How are you holding up?” Illya says under his breath, barely audible.

Napoleon couldn’t think of what to say, besides _don’t go_ , besides crossing the room and finally, _finally_ catching Illya by the wrist, and he thinks, _what the hell, I’m dead anyway_ , and anyway he’s waited long enough — a lifetime at least — to curl his fingers in the lapels of Illya’s jacket, like so, and to pull, like _so_ , and most wondrous of all, Illya meets him, smiling into his mouth, that same half-smile that Napoleon could never read, and still can’t, and loves nonetheless.

“I never thought I’d say this,” Illya says, well-worn words, “but I’m glad to see you, Napoleon,” and Napoleon doesn’t deserve this — Illya’s smile, or any of it — but he’s still holding onto Illya’s wrist, and he thinks that if he doesn’t let go, he can see light through the surface, and sooner or later they’ll break through, gasping in the salt spray, the false moon of a searchlight or the city bearing them home, and for the first time in years Napoleon thinks that he might be able to breathe.

  


* * *

  


EPILOGUE:

Napoleon wakes up when the train slows to a stop. The station isn’t crowded, this early, but there are enough people around that they don’t seem strange, two men with their cases walking through the winding streets and up the old stone stairs, slow but not aimless. “I can’t believe you planted alyssum,” Napoleon says, still blinking the sleep from his eyes, and thinks that he was right: it does smell like honey, great golden waves of it.

“My landlady has a fondness for flowers,” Illya says, “and it was the least I could do, after worrying her so much.”

“I think I’ll need to plant her entire garden, in that case,” Napoleon says; he isn’t looking forward to her ruthless eyebrow, no doubt untempered by age, or the way that she makes him feel thoroughly considered and found wanting, but he’ll buy her jasmine, in the market, and glossy white gardenias, to drown the garden in perfume. It’s the least he can do, too.

“Not a bad idea,” Illya says, and Napoleon bends to brush a hand across the blossoms, almost doesn’t hear when he says, “Coming?”

He looks up. Illya is standing in the open doorway, and considering him with amusement. “Come in, or stand outside all day,” he says.

Napoleon thinks about stories, and the weight of them, and the way he can’t help but follow where they lead; he thinks about sentiment, and the broken clock that he’d carried halfway around the world, and then into the dark and back out again, and the stories he’d told himself that had, in the end, saved him; he thinks about earning happiness, and how he still isn’t sure whether he wants it, and endings that are beginnings in disguise, and he thinks that sometimes happiness is a place, or a time, or the color of the sunlight in the morning — and sometimes it’s forgiveness, or at least understanding — and sometimes it’s a person, and a smile that he can’t begin to understand, and will never tire of trying to anyway.

He steps through the doorway.

 

**Author's Note:**

> HOW DID THIS HAPPEN? WHY ARE YOU SO TERRIBLE: I was in the shower (surprise.) and thought, hey, what is the worst historical AU possible? and something in the back of my brain went MKULTRA! and I said, aloud, “Oh nooo.” I mentioned this to [Cat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/indigostohelit), who also said "Oh nooo," and then said, " _Write it_."
> 
> WHO HELPED MAKE THIS HAPPEN? WHY ARE THEY SO TERRIBLE: This fic owes a vast debt of gratitude to Cat for not only making encouraging horrified noises, but for doing an equally horrifying amount of research and for sitting and watching me throw myself off a thirty-foot-high platform for fun and intermittently telling me the history of the Cold War as a dick joke in the ensuing intervals, and also for incurring what I am sure were punishing library fines, or at least a terrible reputation with librarians, while lending me relevant books. Credit where credit is due to [Rachel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/soaringrachel), who got vodka-drunk with me and Cat and, with Cat, helped me hash out character motivations and story structure. Also, shout-out to my twelfth-grade history teacher, who had no idea that I was going to exact revenge on him for assigning me MKULTRA as a group project (presumably as penance for the sins I had yet to commit, like this one) by producing this monstrosity. You didn’t deserve it, but in my defense, neither did I. If you’re reading this, please never, ever, _ever_ bring it up.
> 
> WHAT ARE THESE BOOKS? ALSO UNDOUBTEDLY TERRIBLE: You are going to have to get Cat to tell you the Dick Joke History Of The Cold War yourself, but I can definitely recommend you _The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate”: The CIA and Mind Control: The Secret History of the Behavioral Sciences_ , by John Marks, a book whose many subtitlular sins you should ignore for the sake of the information contained therein. It’s a great holiday read, especially if you get the edition with the title printed on the cover in massive red serif font and read it on public transit. See also Christopher Andrew on the KGB and Orlando Figes on the Russian Revolution, for some solid adjacent history.
> 
> WAIT, SO THIS IS REAL? THAT’S TERRIBLE: Parts of this are real. In fact, by 1973 MKULTRA was long-ended and so was MKSEARCH, its operational successor, which concluded in fiscal year 1972. The Internet has a lot of pages with poor font choices and painful color schemes which want you to consider the possibility that MKULTRA is ongoing. Google at your own discretion. This fic would not go so far as to substantiate such conspiracy theories, but is certainly predicated on the idea that an analogous covert operation continued into 1973; see: fudging the timelines.
> 
> A LOT OF THESE FACTS ARE ODDLY SPECIFIC AND TERRIBLE: I know. The Cointreau was real, and so were the recorded effects of scopolamine after chloral hydrate, as well as intravenous sodium amytal. There are 178 pages’ worth of Senate hearing on the matter, which I recommend you read as a hard copy if possible, given the brick-to-the-skull headache I suffered after the fact. Gottlieb, Angleton, and Rhodes were all real; the philosophical conversation that went on for hours was real, sadly; the joke that the scientists laugh at is too horrifying to repeat, but involves a senior KGB official; the hotel by Penn Station was the Statler, and the window, suffice to say, was real as well.
> 
> WHAT ABOUT THE OTHER THINGS WHICH ARE ALSO TERRIBLE: Look. If you have a specific question, ask me [here](http://endquestionmark.tumblr.com/askme). I can’t promise that you’ll like the answer, but I’ll do my best.


End file.
